INTRODUCTION
I am Nick Sinclair, a 3D artist from Winnipeg, a mysterious and obscure metropolis in Canada. I began utilizing Blender once I obtained employed to work at Tangent Animation, the primary studio to create characteristic animations with a Blender-based pipeline, together with Subsequent Gen and Maya & the Three. This marked the start of what I affectionately confer with as my Blender fanaticism.
INSPIRATION
Nothing compares to the supreme class of a hand-made steel-framed bicycle with ornate lugs. My purpose was to make an elevated model of my very own bike utilizing classic elements and provides it a clear however lived-in look.
PROCESS
I knew that Blender’s modifiers might deal with an excessive amount of the heavy lifting within the modeling stage, so I solely utilized them once I was pleased with the proportions and had arrange all my UV seams.
MODELING
I modeled small segments of the crankset and used the Array modifier to finish the gears, controlling thickness with Solidify. I added all my UV seams earlier than making use of the modifiers to avoid wasting time.
To make sense of the sophisticated association of the spokes, I used shade coding. After organising the right variety of spokes in a radial array, I made the ultimate place changes in edit mode.
I modeled a small tile-able sq. of the leather-based handlebar wrap and procedurally wrapped it across the handlebars.
This type of motorbike body is brazed collectively and hand-sanded clean, so I wished to attain a seamless look with my mannequin. The lugs have been modeled individually utilizing shrink wrap and intersecting geometry as a reference for elaborations just like the hearts earlier than combining them into the assorted tubes of the bike to create a seamless bike body.
Tying the fastback seat stays into the downtube lug was some of the tough feats of topology fixing.
For the smaller braze-on parts of the bike (highlighted in orange), I gave myself a break and didn’t combine them into the body’s topology.
TEXTURING
Shout out to UVPackmasterPro for making the uv packing course of really easy. There’s not a lot to say apart from to deal with your self to this addon as a result of it’s price each penny.
My method to texturing this challenge was to do a fast protection move on all the weather after which, again in Blender, I explored my compositions to search out out which components of the bike I might render shut up on. This manner, I particularly knew which areas wanted extra consideration than others.
For this challenge, I used a hybrid UDIM setup (roughly 80 tiles). Bigger objects just like the bike body had many UDIM tiles, whereas smaller issues just like the rear derailleur have been arrange in a legacy type. This file had 24 texture units. I choose these over a single-set UDIM format as a result of I discover the efficiency bottlenecks rather more manageable by hiding texture units. The key disadvantage to this method is that the method of importing all these texture units into Blender was fairly tedious.
If I had a time machine, I might have organized my UVs in a standard UDIM format, fastidiously grouping UDIM tiles by supplies whereas avoiding materials overlap with the identical tiles. This manner, I might have had the feel units in Substance Painter to make the file extra manageable but in addition the power to export the textures as one set by foregoing the $textureset tag and as a substitute utilizing the $mesh tag. This might have made importing the various textures into Blender a lot quicker.
LIGHTING & COMPOSITION
I spent an excessive amount of time exploring the presentation of this bike. I attempted posing it in furnished units like a loft house however discovered these units to be too restrictive for locating hanging angles.
So, I opted for a extra minimalist asset presentation type render with 3 lights, some playing cards, and no post-processing.
RENDER – Touring Bicycle
Enjoyable reality: I added a cigarette to the Bluelug character as a delicate reference to the supremely proficient artist Yan Blanco, with whom I had been working in the course of the pandemic.
Thanks for studying. I hope this text evokes you to experience a motorcycle! Be at liberty to ask any questions, and should you like my work, comply with me on social media. Have an excellent day!
Concerning the Artist
Nick Sinclair, a 3D artist with a fist filled with sandwiches and robust opinions about Blender.
