The goal for this asset focus on a larger prop, which would require more work on the texture/shading side than the modeling side. As with my previous telegraph asset, I started off by taking several photos and measurements of the real desk in order to have adequate reference when working on its digital counterpart.
As expected, the modeling portion of this project was very brief. The desk contains many reused shapes (handles, legs, trim, etc.) meaning that only a small fraction of the prop was actually unique in terms of geometry. It also meant that many of the smaller pieces could be stacked on top of each other in UV space, increasing their individual texel density. This ended up being quite important, as recreating many of the minute scratches and other fine details on the desk required a significant amount of texture resolution.
By far, the most crucial part of this project was the materials. I initially started with the wood material I had created for my telegraph asset, but soon found that the material simply lacked the detail I wanted, and started from scratch.
In particular, procedurally adding the wear to the desk’s wood was an excellent learning opportunity, where I utilized almost all aspects of Substance Painter’s baked maps (AO, Curvature, etc.) to create believable scratches, scuffs and fading. This resulted in a reasonably complex material with nearly a dozen layers. However, since each of these layers controlled only a small portion of the final material, it remained highly adjustable throughout the project, allowing for very quick iterations on the desk’s appearance. I used a similar approach for creating the worn brass and leather, which were the other two key materials for this prop.
This animated .gif shows what each layer does, and shows how small variations in multiple layers can be put together to create a much more complex end product.
Lastly, as ever, I continued to improve my presentation and rendering within Marmoset’s ‘Toolbag 3’. This time, I crated a fully white backdrop, which I think helps the prop stand out better, and adds more interesting highlights and reflections onto the desk’s glossy surfaces. Additionally, I performed some minor adjustments within 'GIMP’ (a free image editor, similar to photoshop), such as down-scaling (the images were rendered in 4k) to improve edge details and reduce aliasing, as well as minor adjustments to exposure and color curves. I also used this program created the material .gif above; something I plan on doing for other interesting materials in future projects.
My next project, which I am currently working on, is shaping up to be much larger in scale than my last few; it will be a moderately sized outdoor environment, with a focus in production-ready assets and techniques.