SCAD X The Mill - Lookdev Progress #2

Lookdev Test - Revision

After I started the vehicle look development by testing it on a UV sphere, I focused first on setting up a seamless transition between Redshift and Substance Painter, as some of the textures appear different from how it is in the painter viewport. Thanks to the help of Dee and Zach, I was able to troubleshoot and match the final render a lot better.

Here is the comparison of the initial sphere turntable, and a frame to show how it looks like after-

There were two factors for this change- the first being color management between the two software and the way that I set my normal maps in Redshift.

The problems were solved when I changed the color space of Substance Painter from Legacy to OCIO ACES 1.2,

And also change the normal setting from heightmap to tangent normal space.

Lookdev Test - Revision

I searched for more references that I could better reference while I was texturing our vehicle, and some detailed parts where I wanted to put more attention.

Sharing these references made sure that we were looking for the same visual and damage level. For say, we wanted the tire to look old, which makes it have a lot of dirt buildup and fade from its original black color, but the initial track was relatively clean and smooth due to the friction and restless journey. Unlike the test sphere, the rusts won't be as visible and aggressive as we didn't want to convey our tuk-tuk to be poorly taken care of.

Based on these images, I started painting in Substance Painter based on the set-up that I built for the first tuk-tuk test. I utilized the curvature maps to easily apply and control the damage onto the vehicle. Smart materials and masks also came in useful, as I could have a preliminary visual that I could later work on manually.

Then I exported the textures, and thanks to the setup and pathing, I did not need to manually plug in all the textures of 16 materials into each material network in Houdini.

Some of the materials were done with some more RS shader nodes for more precise control and how opacity & roughness behave is slightly different in RS compared to SP Iray. This is what the node network looks like for the glass panel.

This was to make the dust buildup and dust stains on the glass more visible.

The final render of our first iteration vehicle appears like this- with the turntable on our chosen HDRI, and detail shots of certain parts that our team paid a lot of attention to.

Going forward, I plan to repeat multiple iterations and apply graphics after getting them from Dee. This will not only add realism to our vehicle but character and life to tell our story.