discover how to texture a high-poly vehicle
Follow Matthias Develtere’s guide to texture an armoured vehicle for your own sci-fi universe
Matthias Develtere shares how to texture an armoured vehicle
over the course of this tutorial, I’ll demonstrate how to go about texturing a high-poly vehicle for a sci-fi scene. Here, I hope you’ll find techniques and ideas that will help you to avoid drowning in the big game asset you may be tasked with creating. In this industry, you don’t always get the time to show off your high-poly because of time constraints, and so it’s important to know what steps you can take to improve your creation process. With this workflow, we will come up with a quick pipeline to show off your subdivided model with tileable textures – without any Uving.
We will be using 3ds Max for quick material set up and it’ll also be used as the export plug-in.
This tutorial comes with a super easy script and explanation of how to make quick tracks for your tank. I will also go through some quick tips on how to best texture your model using Keyshot.
I’ll be covering how to set up the unwrap of your model and how to make some tileable textures for it. For these steps we will use Quixel combined with Photoshop. Rendering will happen in Keyshot.
I will also be talking you through some best-practice tips and tricks that you should always be applying to your model.
We will finish by carrying out some post-production work to make sure we isolate the high points from the low points on a surface texture, using ambient occlusion and cavity maps.
01 research Materials
Whenever you’re designing anything, it’s really important to gather references and do some research on the materials you’re going to use. With our tank, for example, it’s really important to nail the tank tracks or the sand-casted base layer. After that, you want to know what’s underneath those materials, so it’s easy to scratch away pieces. The same rule applies for discolouration on the corners; the more little details you can add like this, the better.
02 Max’s Material library
Using materials in 3ds Max can help a lot with readability. I make the same materials for my projects: bare metal, shiny metal, anodized metal, painted metal (base paint), painted metal (accent colour), copper, glass, rubber and plastic. As I already have these materials in an old project, I simply open it and press New Project in 3ds Max. Doing this means everything gets wiped except the materials, and you can start afresh. Export your model with materials as a Keyshot .bip file. This will mean it exports the materials as well, with the correct spec and gloss values.
03 normal Maps
Sometimes having the correct spec and gloss values is not enough to make something look believable – that’s why the bump/ height map exists. Let’s just think about cloth for a minute: without the stitching/fabric pattern, every piece of cloth would look the same. Remember, you don’t want your bump map to be too noisy or repetitive. Bump maps are also great to give some extra lighting information to your models (for example, in cracks). Later on we can convert that lighting information into an ambient occlusion map, and convert that into a colour mask.
04 Making a normal Map
You can make your own bump maps in the same way you make normal maps: bake them from a high-poly model to a low-poly model. However, in our case, you bake them to a plane. You could sculpt something in Zbrush and then bake it down to a flat polygon. This is a really effective method because you determine how much detail your put into it yourself. You can also use Crazybump to create normal maps from a texture, and you can preview your model in real time. Alternatively, you can use Knald to generate the textures.
05 converting images to normals
I tend to use Quixel’s NDO to create simple but effective normal maps because it’s really easy to use. This software converts images to normal/height/bump maps. The nice thing about this software package is that you have a lot of