photorealistic 3D asset – vintage gramophone

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photorealistic 3D asset – vintage gramophone

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Exploring texturing and lighting for a photorealistic 3D asset

For me, the best way to get familiar with a new software I want to integrate into my pipeline is by challenging myself with a new idea. Missing an intro for my current showreel and having a rough concept in mind, I decided to create this vintage gramophone from scratch. The project allowed me to explore photorealistic 3D asset creation, focusing on texturing and lighting with Adobe Substance Painter, while producing a visually compelling showreel piece.

Often being tasked with visualizing brand new and virgin products, I especially enjoyed creating a vintage, used look for a change. It had to look realistic both in a close-up and a full frame view in order to be eligible for the showreel intro though. It turned out that Substance Painter was an excellent choice for that task and I am now regularly using the tool whenever high-quality texturing needs to be done.

First step: a clean base mesh

After I was happy with my research for reference images of old gramophones, my first step was to create a not to detailed base model in Autodesk Maya. I especially paid attention to a clean topology of the underlying mesh, so that I would be able to subdivide it a couple of times and add all the little details via displacement sculpting in a later step.

Since I wanted to show some close-up shots, I would need a high texture resolution. Luckily Substance Painter is able to work with UDIMs, so I decided to unwrap the UVs of the model in a couple of different 4k texture spaces.

To save at least some time I also made use of a freely available kit-bash library of ornaments for further detail.

Adding detail with displacement sculpting

The finished base model was then transferred to Autodesk Mudbox via the FBX file format. I subdivided it until it had a high enough polygon count to hold enough vertices for the detail sculpting. In addition to using various different brushes to get all the little scratches and damages onto the model, I used black and white masks to help with details like the indention on the dial or the horn.

Satisfied with the level of damages on the model, I started the process of texture baking the displacement information into a high bit-depth grayscale image. This image would later at rendering time be used as a displacement map on the low-poly version of the gramophone.

Coloring it all out

One of the great benefits of specialized texturing software is the possibility to extract data like curvature, thickness or ambient occlusion from a high-poly version of your model and to use that information while working on the low-poly version of your asset. That keeps performance high on the one hand and a correct approximation of the final, displaced look in the viewport on the other – best of two worlds.

Now that all that data was available in Substance Painter the fun could begin and – ‘oh boy!’ – it was fun to combine and edit different procedural materials in real time and to be able to control where damage caused oxidation on the brass or dust appeared that had settled over time in small gaps and influences the reflection.

Last step: setting the light and polishing

To really get a good feel if the exported textures will achieve the desired results, I like to use an all-purpose studio scene, I set up a while ago in Cinema 4D & Redshift. After adding some of the renderers photographic effects like depth of field with a nice chromatic aberration and some finishing touches and compositing in Aftereffects, I was very happy with the result.

Below you can find some additional renderings (click for full resolution).