Motorcycle: Road hazard edition

I think I should stop wishing for things to go better, because it clearly doesn't work.

Or maybe I should stop making plans. This motorcycle course was divided into 5 sections. Each of them had several 10-minute videos, pushing the total run time mark to 5 hours. Alright, I thought, one hour of video should translate to about 3 hours of my time. That's one section every day, with material creation coming on Saturday, and Sunday serving as an emergency / polishing day.

It was a good plan and it worked... for the whole of Monday. Since Tuesday I started lagging behind, until I was 2 days behind schedule on Friday. At that point it became clear that something radical would have to be done. No Substance Painter. Which suc- ... is very unfortunate.

Now, there are a few reasons why this happened. One, I'm bad at estimating things of this complexity, and two, the course had a run time of 5 hours, but many things happened behind the scenes so as not to "bore the people who are watching". I wasn't bored! I was desperately trying to follow along!

Well, there are a few more consequences of my poor time management. The motorcycle is missing several parts. They are mostly of the nice-to-have kind, if you don't count the license plate, cables, turn signals, and a whole load of things without which you wouldn't be allowed on the road. (But then, you probably wouldn't get the damn thing going, so it doesn't matter that much.)

But not to be all gloomy, I have learned a couple of new tricks. For instance, it is nice to use shared object data. You keep one object in its original position and rotation, you place its shared copy in the final spot, and then you work on the first one, while the second one gets all the details automatically. Another new thing for me was an object constraint. While working on the SCYTHE lettering, it became clear that it couldn't be mirrored by using conventional methods. With constraint on rotation it becomes surprisingly easy (you just have to tick the correct axes).

Since I don't have much more to add to the modelling part of the course, let's skip talking about the materials (Principled shader all the way) and move directly to the presentation. Boy, that was fun. I finally installed Krita, watched a whole lot of one tutorial, and then tried to composite the final image in it.

Well, it wasn't that bad. I knew what I wanted to do, it was just the execution that failed to meet the expectations. I rendered the motorcycle in Blender with invisible background and visible ground. I could have made the ground invisible too, but I needed it to reflect the light on the bike. I also gave the ground an emitting shader, so that it had solid colour (this becomes important later). I opened the image as a new layer in Krita and tried to execute my perfect plan: select the solid ground colour with magic wand. That worked, if only too well. The gray was far from unique in the scene and I kept targeting areas inside the bike. 

One more final render later, I got a better selection, but spent ages figuring out how to make it transparent. Oh I knew the dialog where that was supposed to happen, but it always came out wrong. I must have re-done it some twenty times before I got a decent result. (I am ignoring the fact that the windshield looks odd with the HDR reflections and I haven't been able to fix it).

But now it's time to say farewell to the practice courses. The June class is on! May it go bet- Oh no, no you don't. Shush! (I'll see you next week with the first iteration of my chosen vehicle. Bye!)