Old Garage

Old Garage

This was an original concept that started as a doodle in my notebook then was pushed to a final idea for a full on interior environment. It was created for my Texture and Shading 2 class at Gnomon and the focus overall was to gain a full understanding of texturing for film related projects. 

Focusing on concepts for lighting and creating realistic textures utilizing Vray, understanding UDIMs, and overall final camera work to bring our ideas through a workflow in understanding 3D for Film and VFX.

This was my biggest project idea at the end of my first year at Gnomon. 

Time management was my challenge. Having other classes going on while also pushing to create something that really could stand out and I'm beyond excited to be able to share the results.

The project was developed over the 10 weeks of our class for Texturing in Substance Painter with final rendering finished in Vray. We learned other important aspects like camera and understanding of lighting during the development of our projects. This was all made using Maya 2020, textured in Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, and rendered with Vray 5.

There was no post work done to the final image, this was entirely accomplished in the render using a series of low resolution renders to constantly be checking my adjustments and changes to my scene.

I began gathering the few things I needed to get started on modeling. 

Finding old dusty and cluttered garages was the main concept. Then I got the idea to craft a unique car for the scene and originally considering a hot rod or rat rod type car. Accidentally stumbling through some old reference blueprints of the cigar race cars from the Auto Union company from some previous idea pitches in other classes. I could chop this thing up and turn it into some kind of junker race car!

I got right to work modeling out the car then just starting playing with contrasting shapes while chopping up the car model to being giving it my own spin on a cigar race car. 

With the fun shapes and parts now being fitted it came time for measurements. I wandered around my own garage and mapping out how this car would fit and where any of this stuff would even fit or if my idea could actually seem believable!

Lighting became my first priority in the early stages of developing the idea.

Using a couple of different lighting setups for overall lighting through HDRi's and quick vray lighting set ups I was able to produce a few variations on lighting looks. After going through them with my teacher we were able to hone in the overall look so when the time for texturing came I would already had a game plan in mind for accomplishing a final look for the lighting of the scene. 

We ended up focusing on the last image for the base idea of the lighting setup and brought in some of the lights from the 2nd lighting look. With those combined we were able to give a feeling like the garage doors might be opened up slightly and there was a window by the work table providing some light for the person fixing up their old race car!

With the modeling near complete and wrapping up UV's it was time to start preparing for exporting assets for textures.

My initial push was to have the scene ready for texture before creating props to fill up the scene. I took some time creating my UDIM sheets and preparing my exports to send to Painter then slowly in my free time began to model some fun props to help fill out the scene. 

Using color coding to create groups of objects to keep my exporting  process manageable while having color coding to visually group what was going with which set. Metals, cloth, rubbers, and so on!

Here is a sense of my exporting process and preparing the models to be sent into Painter, we began to lock in lighting as textures starting making their way back into Maya. This was the most intense part of the process as I had only really done smaller stuff in substance and still barely knew what was going on. My teacher Tran Ma was there to help me every step of the way through my struggles in learning so many new fundamentals and techniques during this project!

This is the final result for the scene wireframe and completed models for the Old Garage Project.

This was the trickiest part to the whole process. Understanding where extra topology was needed or not! I spent extra time trying new things and learning modeling many things quickly while keeping UV layout in mind. Understanding what needed High topology vs low for hero props and background assets. 

Looking back on this project I'm still surprised how well the scene and render holds up! Marvelous Designer was used for all the cloth, seat leather, and rubber fueling hose. It was such a fun experience learning about cloth sim and how quickly it works to get a great result right back into your scene!

Substance Painter time!

I lost plenty of sleep creating these textures and wouldn't have done it differently. The wild nights watching videos for extra information and just experimenting in general with this program was the best part of the whole process. 

Having never used substance painter until this class was an eye opening experience to see how powerful the program could be and the level of detail you could dive into with each model!

You can see here some of the general shots of the textures in painter. Looking up countless old and rusting things or even going into my garage and just looking through our tools to find those hints of details. Oil smudges, dirt, or metal dings and dents. Everything was inspiration at this point!

Thank you for taking the time to look through my project!

This was made out of love for my hobby of working on cars in my free time. Getting to open up some of the cars and find those details to bring into my scene was a blast. Wandering around my garage and looking at tools or oil spots on old rags! Everything was a welcome sight when developing this scene.

Having grown up working on cars with my grandpa and father was something that went into this project. It became the driving force to push this scene as far as I could. A quick shout out to my grandpa and pops for teaching me things that I never expected to influence my art. 

I had such an amazing journey through the 10 weeks of this project learning so much daily about lighting, texture, modeling, and just managing myself to see the project through to the end!

Original concept and Final result by Russell Griffith-Marlin