Blender 2.8 Part IV: The Platform
I had done tutorials, read articles, talked to people, and built my own prop in Blender 2.8. Now, I needed to push through a small portfolio project to prove to myself that I could use Blender in a production setting. Welcome, to that project’s post-mortem.
Traditionally, post-mortems for my projects are written up on my personal blog in a format I devised a few years ago. I find it lets me organize thoughts on my personal works in a fairly clear and concise way. I can identify what I succeed and failed at as well as what I needed to improve upon. A great example would be my World War I Trench Kit post-mortem. That project was one I considered a bit of a failure and as such, the post-mortem is well worth the read (I find projects that do not go according to plan to make for excellent learning experiences).
With out further adieu, I present the post-mortem for The Platform.
The Post-Mortem
The Platform was a project that I sketched up one day while waiting for a render at DreamLine, or perhaps while I was on the train. Either way, dead lifting was clearly on my mind.
This sketch was banked for another day. I was working on a more Cyber Punk\Retro Future inspired scene at the time. Eventually that project was pushed to the side when I found myself burnt out and busy with wedding planning earlier in 2019. Once I decided I was going to learn Blender, this sketch immediately came to mind as a sort of ‘Final Project’. The geometry isn’t complex, it’s small, and I though I could do it justice, which I can’t say was totally true for my Trench Kit.
The project as a whole was what I would consider a great success, unlike my Trench Kit. It’s rare for me to feel that a project of comes together exactly as I saw it in my mind, but when I look at the final Marmoset render, I feel as if that’s exactly what I saw in my head.
I haven’t had a project go this smoothly…ever.
What Went Right
Blender: My shift to Blender had been going well prior to this piece, but I was unsure if I could use it start to finish in a portfolio piece. Turns out I could!
Blender wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I needed to keep thinking about what short cut keys did what, in which workspace was the option I was looking for, and everything else that comes up when you are using new software. I had been using it on and off for a few months at this point so I knew where most things were, but I will need a full year to avoid that bit of awkwardness while I work.
Outside of that, modeling in Blender was a breeze. High poly models, low poly models, little bolts and washers, barbells, everything I made more or less came out as I wanted it to. Having the ability to get plugins at a moments notice to augment (or frankly fix) some issues with Blender was key at times.
Blender Look Dev: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Eevee is phenomenal. When working in Maya, I usually plugged in only a color map and a normal map. Maya’s real time viewport got an upgrade with Stingray PBS a few years ago (and judging by this has been updated to be even better in 2019) but it’s historically been a far cry from the final output you will see in a real time application.
Eevee on the other hand is close to not only looking like Marmoset (my renderer of choice for this project) or Unreal/Unity in fidelity, but it also is a near match for Blender’s path traced renderer, Cycles.
In the image above, I took the time to see how Cycles, Eevee and Marmoset looked like side by side. Cycles and Eevee are ALMOST IDENTICAL. You need to zoom in to see the major differences (sharpness, transparency, reflections) but at a zoomed out high level view, you can’t see much of a difference. The difference between Eevee and Marmoset is more pronounced due to focus depth and some additional shadow/lighting changes that Marmoset necessitated (lacking support for rectangle lights mostly).
In short, I can preview my work in Eevee and be reasonably confident it’ll look correct in most real time applications.
Substance Painter: I’m not going to go very in-depth here, but Painter was invaluable in texturing my assets. I was able to tell the story of use and abuse with my textures though thought out use of chalk and general wear painting. It’s subtle, but the platform has definitely seen better (and cleaner)days.
Additionally, I have more plans for the Barbell and the Platform itself in the future and because I used Substance Painter in a non destructive, multi layered way, I can and have made these adjustments easily.
What Went Wrong
UVs: Blender’s major weakness as compared to Maya (for my uses) is it’s UV tools. Blender just doesn’t have overly intuitive UV tools. Outside of marking seams and unfolding UV’s, it takes much more work in Blender to move UV’s, align them in optimized ways, and to relax them in a controlled manner. I missed Maya’s UV toolset.
This is what led me to download TexTools. As I mentioned earlier in this series, this version of TexTools is a straight port from what existed in 2.79, so some features don’t work. However, it has the majority of UV tools functioning.
Straighten, Rectify, and Edge Peel were immensely helpful in unwrapping my models. I personally didn’t use the movement tools much but it’s nice they are there.
The other UV tool that I leaned heavily on was UVPackmaster2. This tool is paid (official TexTools is donation based) and at $16 bucks some may consider it a bit steep for a plugin, but the speed at which it can pack UV’s, and it’s awareness of all sorts of different UV Island sizes and complexities makes it a steal in my eyes. It made my work with this project go infinitely faster.
It’s great that I found tools to help with my work, but it’s unfortunate that I had to search for them in the first place. This is the unfortunate downside of open source software development.
Exporting to Marmoset: Moving from Blender to Marmoset wasn’t actually much of an issue, at least not until it came to lighting.
I set up and lit everything in Blender first. I considered rendering everything out of Blender but decided to wrap it all up in Marmoset as it’s volumetric fog options are far superior, and the option to use Voxel based GI was too good to pass up. I knew that Marmoset would import the camera, but I didn’t know how well it would handle the lighting imports.
It did a fine job overall, but I had a few adjustments to make:
- The camera didn’t maintain certain FOV and region settings.
- The light shapes (for proper reflection of light) needed to be set up inside Marmoset, although the light intensity and and color came over fine.
- I had to manually import my HDRI and set it up inside Marmoset to match my Eevee output.
The biggest issue though, was finding a way to get my fill light to work. In Blender, I created a rectangle light that very faintly added some front fill to the scene and to the barbell (the spot light up top is my key light and other fill is handled by a weak HDRI). When I moved my scene to Marmoset, I had to spend a lot of time tweaking and re-working that front fill to get the same look and feel as the Blender scene. I managed to get something that worked pretty well in the final result, but it took a lot of tweaking and some creative cropping.
Project Takeaways
This project was a great experience for me. It’s rare that my art comes together exactly as I saw it in my mind, but The Platform did.
- Blender 2.8 is in my workflow and it’s here to stay. Is it “better than Maya” for what I do? Very arguable. But it’s significantly more cost effective at this time and a hell of a lot of fun. Plus, Eevee.
- I chose a project of an appropriate scope and subject matter.
- Marmoset’s Baking Tools continued to show their flexibility during this project.
This project went so well that elements of it have been incorporated into my current project. The Platform seems to be just that, something I can grow from.
My experience transitioning over to Blender has been mostly positive. It’s been a joy to learn and use, and I’m using it now for most of my personal projects. If a freelance opportunity came up and I needed speed and accuracy, I’d continue to use Maya since I’m still faster with it and it’s a standard piece of software in the industry. With time and practice though, I can see Blender taking many different roles in my personal pipeline.
I’ve also noticed that with the official release of 2.8, many professionals in the games industry are giving it a try. YouTube channels like Flipped Normals and YanSculpts are pumping out more content that is aimed at professionals and amateurs a like. Epic Games has also pledged $1.2 Million to the Blender Foundation out of it’s Grants program. Blender has never been so popular. The future looks bright too, as 2.81 will be adding features and updates in November that address many quality of life issues still present in 2.8.
If you’re interested in giving Blender a test drive, you can check it out here. I’m glad I did.
