Redesing Gadgetron Shop

The origin

I started this project as part of my training at Voxel School, specifically in the Master “Digital Art for Videogames”. In this task, we were asked to find a prop with a certain difficulty and recreate it under our abilities. This is why I decided to look for an item of my favorite video game series, Ratchet and Clank. After looking for different options, I decided to recreate the Weapons Shop of the game. Looking for references, I found other artists who had done similar work, and I wanted to use my skills trying to recreate the same piece. After a short period of time, I decided to took Romain Lambert's work as inspiration, and worked in a new one thinking about how my store would look if it was in the new Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.

Concepts and final model

The process

The process of making this prop was really challenging, as it was the first time I had done anything over 1000 quads. In addition, our teacher was very demanding with the quality of the mesh, and we were asked to avoid tris and ngons at all costs. We were explained about the high and low poly pipeline in 3Ds Max while we were doing it, with all the problems that this causes.

Because all this difficulties, I had to make up to 10 different meshes to get the result I wanted. In this way I managed to build my final mesh using symmetry almost entirely. Thanks to this, I was able to make the textures of my object not exceed 1024px and still look perfect.

Making off

The renders

Like everything I've been doing for a few months, I was once again faced with a new program, Marmoset. Despite my perseverance and efforts, the reality is that I did not get a result that satisfied me 100%, so I decided to use other programs like Unreal Engine and Substance Painter. In this way, I found new types of problems (Translucent order, HDRI, etc…). That is why I decided that I would get the best of each of the program, and run the render in all of them to show the best possible work.

Marmoset

In Marmoset, I managed to obtain really vibrant blues that make certain details of the shadows stand out. However, the light reflection according to the normal map did not have the desired quality.

Substance Painter

In Painter, I got some very fine detail from normals. However, the inability to work the lights made difficult to display everything the way I wanted.

Unreal Engine 5

Finally, I was lucky enough to work on this prop when Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) came out. Because of UE5 and the recommendation of my teacher, I decided to import the prop to UE5. However, the work of translucent objects in unreal is completely different from what I knew. Because of this reasons,it was impossible to have in certain places the transparency according to its texure.