Weekly drill 055: Steampunk Compass

For this challange I chose to make a sun dial compass with spider features. Since the set theme for this drill is steampunk, I chose to also give it some mad-scientist vibes for the more horror-nished subgenre.

Done: Modelling, rigging, texturing, post effects
Not done: Concept art

Below is a view of layers used in Substance Painter and  some images of my workflow in Maya. Textures and tiled maps. 

The images above demonstrates:
1. Blocking phase of this model.
2. Scale check, to make the model life-like in size.
3. Pose preparation, did some rigging tests along the modelling stages.
4. The UV's

From concept to postedit.
Attributions (Inspiration):
Steampunk spider/crab design (Peter Szucsy)
Lab environment, orange/green (Atris @ cgsociety)

Reflection

What worked well and not:

Modelling the asset and setting it up for poses went smoothly, from the topology planning, chisling it out and putting the pieces in place. First idea for the green paint on the spider was actually something oil or ink-like, to relate more to the steampunk theme. It turned out not to be a particularly attractive look, so I turned the work over to be even more to the horror-nisch.

This is the first time I've worked with these quantities of tiles spread over very few materials, it was more time consuming than necessary to re-apply this UV setup in other applications, to keep it within time. The idea was to create a faster workflow in SP and use uv shells planned out to be easily selectable and defined by color to create masks for the material layers. Using Substance for rendering the final images was not the initial plan, but worked out better than expected, balancing clear and environment background for a rather clumsy 3-point lighting effect. I’d say the texturing itself went pretty fast and was just easy and fun to do.

This was a very fun project to work on as a first entry and I am very happy with the result. It took approximately 3 days to model the asset and 2 days to set up the UV map, pose it and apply the look. It left 2 days of extra tinkering to give it some extra pop, testing out more poses, angles, colors, some more rigging and playing with the design.