{"id":142060000324,"date":"2021-07-08T08:00:19","date_gmt":"2021-07-08T06:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sketchfab.com\/blogs\/community\/?p=142060000324"},"modified":"2021-07-09T15:47:42","modified_gmt":"2021-07-09T13:47:42","slug":"art-spotlight-cloud-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sketchfab.com\/blogs\/community\/art-spotlight-cloud-station\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Spotlight: Cloud Station"},"content":{"rendered":"

About Me<\/h2>\n

Hi there! My name is Alexa Kruckenberg. I am a US-based technical artist and a graduate of Utah Valley University<\/a>, where I studied game design and animation. I currently only make art as a hobby, but I hope to eventually turn it into a career!<\/p>\n

In school, I focused a lot on creating realistic models through the PBR pipeline. It wasn\u2019t until I graduated that I began to work in a more stylized, hand-painted approach, which I enjoy much more. Finding my niche in the 3D world has definitely made the creative process much more exciting for me!<\/p>\n

I hope I can teach you something new as I go through the process of creating Cloud Station!<\/p>\n

Inspiration<\/h2>\n

I browse Instagram A LOT (maybe more than I should) and currently follow over 850 artists. When I see an illustration that speaks to me, I add it to an album that I can look through whenever I get the 3D art bug. In this particular case, I had added this illustration<\/a> by EllievsBear<\/a> to that album over a year ago, and I\u2019m sure you know how it goes: you keep meaning to get to a project, and things keep getting in the way!<\/p>\n

Well, one night I couldn\u2019t sleep and I decided to try to tire myself out by starting a new project. I looked through my inspiration album, and that illustration caught my eye again. I knew it was finally time to bring it to life!<\/p>\n

Modeling<\/h2>\n

I started by modeling the hills using half-spheres and simple extrusions. Getting them to look nice and smooth was important, and to me, there\u2019s no better tool for that in Maya than the smooth function in the Quad Draw tool. I like to also turn on Soft Select to increase the influence of the smooth tool. It evens out the topology so nicely!<\/p>\n

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Once I was satisfied with the hills, I started on the aeropuppies (that\u2019s what the artist called the fish-looking critters). These were also created with half-spheres and extrusions, plus a little bit of the Quad Draw tool (if you can\u2019t tell, I\u2019m a big fan of the Quad Draw tool). I knew I wanted them to be animated in the final design, so I made sure to keep my topology light and simple to make rigging easy for myself.<\/p>\n

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At that point, it was 4 AM, but I was so excited that I didn\u2019t want to stop! The buildings, signs, and other small details were fairly simple to make\u2014most of them are just cubes with a few extrusions here and there. The most difficult pieces were the long ropes for the bridge, which I made using the cap of a tiny cylinder extruded along a curve. But all in all, nothing was particularly challenging to make\u2014it was just a matter of making sure I matched all the small details in the original illustration. By the time I was done, I had modeled through the entire night, but I was super happy with what I\u2019d made!<\/p>\n

Texturing<\/h2>\n

After getting some sleep, it was time to texture everything! I separated the model into 5 materials: the hills, the details on hills 1 and 3, the details on hills 2 and 4, the skybox, and the aeropuppies. Separating things like this made it easy to isolate parts of the model in Substance Painter. I worked with a lot of masks to keep the various small bits separated from each other. Also, folders in Substance Painter are maybe the best thing ever, because you can add masks to them as well, and they also help keep your layers organized. I had easily over 100 layers by the time I was done texturing, so organization was super important!<\/p>\n

I knew I wanted to put this on Sketchfab in its final form, and that definitely influenced my texturing workflow. As I added more and more detail to the textures, I periodically uploaded the model to Sketchfab as a draft to make sure everything looked right. I also set up my post-processing effects early on so I knew what I would need to bake into the textures in terms of lighting and texture, and what I could leave up to Sketchfab\u2019s 3D viewer.<\/p>\n

In order to keep things looking consistent between Substance Painter\u2019s 3D viewer and Sketchfab\u2019s, I found a custom unlit shader<\/a> for Substance Painter that allowed me to work with the same unlit settings that I ended up using in Sketchfab. This was a major breakthrough for me because I was unable to work in Material view in Substance Painter with their default shader\u2014it just looked too different due to the environment lighting, which I had decided to turn off in Sketchfab. With the custom shader, I could focus just on the Base Color and Opacity maps, which were all I really needed to worry about.<\/p>\n\n\t\t