As said in the previous post, I wanted to test my workflow of creating a 3D object in Blender, exporting it into Substance Painter and then compositing it back in Blender.

Knowing that my chest test didn’t go very well, I knew I wanted to create a model that only had one mesh and that wouldn’t be overly complicated. Browsing the google I stumbled upon some pictures of chess pieces and decided to try and create a rook/castle piece.

This was the picture I took inspiration from. I also knew that I didnt want to work with wood textures however, but thought I could easily make a metal chess piece and it wouldn’t seem too out of place.

 

My practise with modeling in Blender payed off as I was quickly able to make something akin to what I wanted. Using Subdivision and edge loops I tried to make the edges as natural looking as possible, however subdivision on full made the model loose some of the definition that made it recognisable in my opinion, so I turned up the mean crease to 0.60. I knew that having it on 1 would make it look like there wasn’t any subdivision happening so settled for something in the middle.

 

After subdividing my mesh, I thought unwrapping would be a daunting task, especially when taking in all the vertices the mesh now had. However to my surprise I was able to unwrap it first time, the seams I made seemingly working quite well.

I exported my mesh and brought it in to Substance Painter. Everything seemed to be working very well.

I found myself a lot more comfortable with creating a metallic texture and was able to layer masks and generators until I got the effect of worn away black paint that I was looking for.

Once I was happy with the textures I exported them and prepared to bring everything back into Blender.

I ran into a small hiccup at the start, with not finding the right options to get to where Jon was in his tutorial. I discovered this was because I had forgotten once again to use the cycles renderer. Once I switched it was very simple to plug all my texture nodes into the right places and get my texture properlly placed on to my model.

I wanted to see what it would look like in a properly lit scene, so decided to insert it into the same footage I used with the Barrel test I did.

I think it looks ok, but I think the black paint was not a good idea. Its a bit too harsh for the photorealism I am looking for.

Overall however, I am very happy with my progress. This is the first time I have completed the entire process of creating, texturing and compositing without using a tutorial, and it took me around 3 hours in all. As I practise more this will speed up as my confidence with the software grows.