CREATING THE droids
These are the droids you’re looking for! Matthew Carranza explains how he made the scene’s highly detailed astromechs
In his day job Matthew Carranza is an environment artist, but for the Bay 94 project he was tasked with creating everyone’s favourite droid, R2-D2 (as well as the one with the bad motivator, R5-D4).
For reference Matthew used a mixture of stills from A New Hope and photos of real, life-sized R2-D2 droids built by fans.
For modelling Matthew turned to 3ds Max 2013. “I start off any model by building out a high-poly model, and then making a low-poly model from the high,” says the artist, adding: “The astromech droids are, at their core, a collection of simple shapes. That was my core thought process while making these guys. If a piece I was modelling started to feel a little too complex I knew I was going about making it all wrong, so I would scrap it and start over. This happened a lot.”
There are many pieces to the droids that look to be very intricate, but really are just simple shapes with cut lines, extrusions, insets and chamfers. “Right off the bat I knew I was going to be making the R2 and R5 units, so I decided early on that I was going to have three meshes to make the shared body and the different R2 and R5 heads. Luckily enough the only major difference between the R2 and R5 bodies was the colouring.”
Matthew wanted these droids to be as movie-accurate as possible, “but at the same time I knew I was going to have to take artistic liberties with some of the pieces I couldn't get accurate reference for, so I wouldn't stress out on some detail that might not even be that noticeable.”
After two months of working on the droids in his spare time, Matthew turned to a program called Ipackthat. “It did a great job at minimising my unused UV space. The body of the droid came out to around 18 per cent unused space, while the heads got down to about 26 per cent, which isn’t bad considering all of the round UV islands.”
For texturing Matthew used Quixel and says his workflow is pretty straightforward: “I start by uploading the low-poly model and the baked out normal map from either xnormal or 3ds Max and create a new project. I masked out areas where I wanted paint, metal, plastic pieces and threw some modified sandy grime over the whole piece. I tried working on both the heads and the body at the same to get them looking the same. I also made use of saving out my own custom material so I could use it on multiple projects.”
Once Quixel had done it’s work, Matthew took his droid pieces into Unreal Engine 4 for some final adjustments to make the characters believable. “I did have to always keep in mind the kind of wear and tear these droids have on them,” Matthew explains. “They exist on a dry, dirty and sandy planet, so the amount of grunge and grit on the droids should reflect that.”