Art Spotlight: #3December Wooden

About

Hello, my name is Martin and I am a Senior Artist working in the mobile games industry for the last 10 years. I graduated from a computer arts course at Abertay University in Dundee (Scotland) in 2009 and have been working in Dundee ever since. I am very much a generalist when it comes to disciplines as I have worked on every visual aspect in mobile games from 3D to UI to animation and illustration. My passion is 3D and I have a deep love for Blender, which I have been using for a few years now. I started using Maya in university and then had to learn 3ds Max when I got my first job, but Blender is my go-to 3D tool now.

Inspiration for #3December Wooden

I decided to enter the 3December Sketchfab competition this year as I wanted to create more personal projects in my spare time, and this seemed to be a good way to kick start it all. The competition requirements were to create a model each day from the 2nd Dec to the 22nd.

Here is my collection for 3December 2019:

3December 2019 by martinMCGREGOR on Sketchfab

The prompt for the 4th day was “Wooden” so I set out to try and create something quickly and decided to go down the hand-painted route, so I didn’t need to worry about lighting and shaders later. I love seeing hand-painted textures in games like League of Legends and Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment’s art style, in general, is a real inspiration.

Modeling

I created the model and texture entirely in Blender as it has great speed modeling tools and speedy UV mapping. As I was trying to create this model quickly and it did not need to be game-ready, I didn’t spend a lot of time optimizing the mesh or the UV layout so that I could spend more time on the texturing.

I had initially thought to make a play on “steak and chips” with a plate with a wooden steak on it surrounded by all the little shaving chips, but as I got into it it felt like it needed more. I was happy enough with a quick test paint of one of the wooden logs so I decided to duplicate it and add the belt and built up a little story from there. It soon became a little vampire hunter’s preparation diorama. I think it’s important to find the story so that you have a good foundation to build the art on.

Painting

I unwrapped the UVs using mostly automated unwrapping for speed so that I could get on to the fun part of painting up the texture. It was the first time I had used the painting tools in Blender properly so there was a little bit of back-and-forth with brush options, but I soon got into the flow. I painted directly onto the model in one single texture with no layers.

Blender has a great feature that allows you, in Edit Mode, to select certain parts of the geometry that act as a mask when painting. I used this feature to quickly fill in all the solid base colours for each component.

After that I choose a general direction for light so that I could paint up highlights and then the reverse for shadows.

I found that working with two brush settings helped maintain consistency. One brush with a soft falloff with pen pressure controlled opacity for lighter softer gradients and shading, and the other with a harder falloff with both opacity and size being controlled by pen pressure for the details.

Although this was meant to only take a day, it ended up taking a good few lunchtimes at work to get it finished.

Publishing on Sketchfab

As this model was hand-painted, I wanted it to remain unlit in Sketchfab for that lovely illustrated look. So I left a lot of the advanced settings alone only to select classic renderer and then shadeless.

As a senior artist, I have been involved in the interview process a lot at work and have viewed many a portfolio and I would say that being able to utilize Sketchfab as part of your portfolio will make you stand out a lot more and helps us see how each piece is built. All in all, Sketchfab is a great forum for artists and it’s a great community to be a part of. Thank you all and can’t wait to see what you all come up with next!

Thanks for your time.