Hard-Surface Modeling & Texturing Breakdown For Creating a Stormtrooper Holding a Rifle

Introduction

My name is Eric Persson. I currently work as an Art Director for video games, but for most of my career, I have worked as a Concept Artist. I started learning 3D Art when I went to school for visual effects in Stockholm in 2010; it was a crash course on everything CGI — from basic modeling, sculpting, texturing, rendering, animation, scripting, compositing, dynamics, and scripting. We got a taste of a little bit of everything and had to choose a specialization early, but it was the best time I’ve had in school, and I still miss those days of learning something new and exciting every day. I made friends there who are still close to me today, and I learned many life lessons about the importance of staying curious and hungry to learn new things.

After getting the opportunity to attend a concept art internship at DICE in Stockholm as part of my education, I put my 3D work on pause for a while since my job mainly involved quick sketches, painting, and photobashing. I returned to it a few years later when 3D started to become an important skill set for Concept Artists, and I’ve been using it ever since as part of my workflow.

About the Stormtrooper Project

The Stormtrooper project was an attempt to get more familiar with the workflows in Blender, but I also set out to learn Substance 3D Painter and try some basics in Marvelous Designer. I dabbled in some character art before but never finished a full character because I always lost motivation halfway through. I figured that making a character of a design that already exists with a lot of hard surface pieces and plenty of references should be straightforward and keep my motivation up.

I learned Maya in school, but I found it to be extremely clunky for modeling. A few years before that, I had tried XSI Softimage, which felt way more natural for modeling, and what I saw of Blender really reminded me about working in XSI, so I wanted to give it a shot. I was also really impressed by how easy it was to set up an HDRI and get a decent-looking render in Cycles compared to the overly complex workflow of Mental Ray that I was used to.

Before starting this project, I had completed some Blender tutorials by Vaughan Ling, aka Heavypoly, so I knew the basics of getting around the software. I strongly recommend his config and shortcuts for a much faster workflow. To this day, I can’t work in Blender without them.

Modeling

I started by making the undergarment suit in Marvelous Designer. Using a scanned base mesh as an avatar, I created garments and wrapped the character with the suit and gloves to get natural-looking folds in the clothing. This might seem unnecessary, considering how little you see of the suit after adding the armor pieces, but it was a fun exercise to learn the basics of Marvelous Designer.

For modeling the armor, I approached this project with workflows I learned in school, which were subdivision-based and involved lots of supporting edge loops. I was really impressed by the non-destructive nature of modifiers in Blender, so I made all the armor parts with single-sided planes using solidify and subdivision modifiers. This allowed me to quickly make changes and adjust proportions before applying the modifiers to unwrap the thickness of the parts. I also really enjoyed grabbing a collection of high-resolution references of Stormtrooper suits from the original trilogy and using those for model guidance throughout the process.

The rifle was approached the same way as the armor. I had some good references for the E11 rifle used in the movies that helped with modeling the details. This was the first time I made a weapon in 3D from start to finish, and I really enjoyed the process. Even to this day, when I approach a 3D character project, I like to start with the weapons first. There’s just something really satisfying about blocking out the characters when you see them with a cool weapon from the start.

Topology & Unwrapping

In SubD modeling, you want to try to keep even quads on your models, avoid Ngons and stretched faces for better deformation, and even distribution of polygons in case you sculpt on top of the asset. I used these guidelines together with supporting edge loops, but I’ve learned techniques since then to better terminate those edge loops so they don’t go around the model and add stretched faces. I would probably address these issues if I had a reason to revisit the topology on this model.

For unwrapping, I used the standard unwrapping tools in Blender — marking seams where they made the most sense and using live unwrap to see the results as I made changes. This was a very welcome approach that was different from how I learned UV mapping in Maya. I used to auto-unwrap the model, then painstakingly move and sew edges together. Looking back, I can’t believe how inefficient that method was. I try to automate as much as possible with UV layouts and only make manual adjustments if absolutely necessary.

Texturing

Before getting started on texturing, I watched some tutorials on the basic workflow in Substance 3D Painter, and it was really easy to follow. Basically, you want to fill your texture coverage with tiling base materials before working in imperfections through combinations of mask generators and hand painting where necessary. I used edge wear, corner dirt, and whatever else I could identify from photo references before layering in some manual imperfections in the generated masks with a more natural breakup. The workflow makes so much sense, and the layer stack is very familiar to anyone who knows Photoshop, so I found it easy to get into.

I loved analyzing details of the film costume references and layer details of dirt, paint, and roughness breakups in Substance 3D Painter to get a similar look to the worn costume I had in my reference. For the rifle, I mostly used photos of the Sterling submachine gun, which was the original reference they used for the E11 rifle in the movies. There were simply better closeups in greater detail and a more appropriate amount of wear of the different metals in the real weapons compared to the movie props.

Final Presentation

For presenting the final work, I like to rig and pose characters even if the pose is simple — I think it is a nice final touch. I used the Blender addon “Rigify” to quickly skin the low poly mesh and paint out the worst deformation areas. The armor pieces parented to specific bones to make sure they didn’t deform with the pose but stayed rigid. This limited what I was able to do with the pose a bit while avoiding clipping, but I only needed one pose to work, so it was fine.

For the background, I took inspiration from how characters are presented in the menus of Star Wars Battlefront 2 — I like how the iconic wall light patterns from the Empire's iconic environments give some simple context to a very simple scene.

Lighting & Rendering

For this project, I did render tests in both Cycles and Octane for comparison. Both renderers have their benefits, and it was interesting to see the results side by side. At the time of making this project, Octane didn’t support any light source entities so I had to replace spotlights with planes of HDR light sources and tweak the intensity to get comparable results.

Cycles had a more natural look when rendering the cloth material, while Octane had a slight advantage in the rendering of metals, looking more crisp and less blurry. Octane is blazing fast even when adding fog and lens effects like depth of field, distortion, or light dispersion, so if I need to use elements like those in the presentation, it would be my go-to renderer. In the end, I used Cycles for most of the final renders as I preferred the look even though the final images took much longer to render.

Summary

I do these projects in between work hours of my day job, so it’s really hard to estimate the time from start to finish, but probably 150+ hours over a period of a couple of months.

My biggest challenge was probably importing and exporting assets between different software with consistent results, rendering a Displacement Map for the blaster burn marks on the armor from ZBrush, and having it show as intended in the render. It took a lot of trial and error, I still don’t know what I’m doing but just try different settings until I get something that works. I should really study those technical details a bit more and learn them better.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the texturing process. After finishing the armor and rifle, I looked to see if I had any more finished props just to have something more to texture in Substance 3D Painter. I still enjoy texturing; it’s really rewarding to see models come to life by adding color and layering in storytelling through scratches, fingerprints, and imperfections.

Eric Persson, Art Director at Activision Blizzard

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford