New Cardboardia

Too... tired... to... think...

Competitions are a great way to push yourself to create something truly special. I'll be the first to admit that without Weekly CG Challenge I'd never have thought of building a virtual city made of cardboard. Competitions, however, have a downside as well. At least for me, they do. I somehow always end up biting off more than I can chew. So far I've managed to chew up everything on time, but one of these days, I swear...

A lot has happened over the past few days (and especially the last 10 hours), so I don't really know where to begin. It looks like I'll be making one of those bullet points posts again.

1. Substance Painter is a great tool, but project file size can become ridiculous. And large project means couple of minutes staring on "Saving project..." text every time you press the magic buttons. That's not fun, so I divided my scene into 4 fbx exports (3 for neighbourhoods and 1 for little details).

2. Texture Atlas is a great tool, unless you somehow manage to trigger a Python error. (Don't ask me how.) It's especially useful when you just finished a meticulous UV unwrap of several objects and you are now unable to get rid of the (temporarily, pff!) merged object.

3. I'm never sure if texturing a flat, no-depth surface (aka plane) is OK in Substance Painter, so I spent most of my time battling the UVs of weirdly shaped boxes. Normal cubes are OK. Cubes with an applied Solidify modifier, poorly made flaps and odd-shaped cutouts are not. 

4. Pretending to spray-paint things is great. But do you know what's even better? Doing a fill first and THEN removing parts of it with the spray brush. If only I didn't realize this while working on the last neigbourhood...

5. Microdisplacement is really powerful. Usually more powerful than your poor little PC. But carpets, carpets are evil. I'm going to share with you a progress gif at the end of the post, and I'll be giving small, insignificant bonus points to anyone who can count how many times the carpet texture changed. I may have spent more times fiddling with that than with the rest of the scene. At one point I even had two pieces of the carpet with different displacement strenghts, because the faraway bit looked like glass from this angle.

6. Which brings me to the joys of PBR workflow. I know my scene will look correct in all lighting conditions, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will look like I want it to. Unless, of course, I spend incredible amount of time tweaking every damn shade of colour there is. Which reminds me that I should start inventing my own colours, because I'm regularly running out of the known ones.

7. If you have to tweak everything, you might as well embrace—er, prepare for it. In the last iteration of texturing, I wrapped the objects in my custom smart material, without painting them. Then I exported the textures and assigned them in Blender. From that moment on, every change I made in Substance painter was only two clicks away from showing up in Blender, because the textures were automatically overwritten and Blender loaded them up without asking any questions.

8. And finally, it is really nice to know what everyday things look like. Street markings, cardboard bottoms, police cars... you name it, I had to google it. Which becomes a bit embarassing after a while. My browser history in the past two weeks if mostly filled up with searches of "cartoon _something_".

Well, not the most tidy blog post I've written, but one that pretty well sums up my current state of mind. (Hint: craaaaa-zyyyy) But I can't leave without showing you the gif I promised, so here it is, and I'll see you next week.