Mastering Hard Surface in Blender

Take a seat and strap yourself in for this knowledge-filled article with Sady as he breaks down his hard surface workflow in Blender. We cover topics such as: how Sady sets up his Blender scenes, which addons and resources he uses as well as texturing with multiple UV sets.

Intro

My name is Sady Fofana and I'm an environment artist at Valkyrie Entertainment. I've been a user of 3d programs for roughly 5-6 years & in my free time I work on learning the hard surface modelling workflow. Other hobbies include biking, miniatures, cooking & gaming.

Lighting Setup In Blender

The way I go about lighting in blender is to start off with a simple 3 point lighting setup then work my way up from there, having references for different lighting styles is a plus for visually blocking out early lighting setups. When I use colours in lights I try to match the light colour to the prop depending on theme or prop colour, sometimes messing with general camera settings (focal length, aperture, framing) gives me a decent understanding on what light points to tweak/adjust.

Blender Lighting Tips

My tips for lighting stuff in blender is to work with a few different lighting setups and cycle through with what you have so far, sometimes I'd pick from one lighting setup and add to another because it had better looking results compared to the first 2. Finding colour pallets & lighting references is a plus for lighting your model/scene, also working with the colours of the model can help compliment the lighting, with a basic understanding of colour theory you can focus in on what you need to adjust to visually enhance your models.

Making Adjustments

Some of the larger changes I've made with the model was to fix the seating height and using a UE4 model as a size reference helped to make adjustments where needed, other changes went from changing the seat cushion patterns & adding a few inner details of the broken chair parts. Originally I was going for a lightly worn down look for the model but after taking a break from this project I was playing The Ascent and it inspired me to go for some of the broken rundown variations of the model.

Flickering Scan Lines

The way I created the scanlines & screen RGB’s was with 2 different node groups for different screen types, the scan lines was a janky setup of math groups & wave textures that filtered the image(  plugged into an emission) with a solid black colour resulting in the line effect, with updates during each use I've added some small things like the ability to adjust colour or contrast of displayed texture & ability to change line blending. For the RGB lines I watched this tutorial on how to set up the node effect.

Hard Surface Tips and Addons

My tips for working on hard surface modelling is to work on small modelling exercises, going through Pinterest to find old machine parts is a good way of building up a visual library. Some of my favourite addons to use in Blender for hard surface modelling are Hardops, DECALmachine, KIT OPS and Loop Tools. These programs are constantly updated and work well with hard surface modelling.

Resources For Learning Blender Hard Surface Modelling

A few resources I recommend for hard surface modelling are YouTube channels like ArtOfSoulburn, Blender Bros, mx2 etc. They’ve been a big help with discovering new hotkeys and modelling workflows, also pretty good at breaking down parts of an addon with explanations on how to use them.

Blender Material Setup

I'm pretty happy with how I went about setting up the main material for the bench piece. I'm a coward when it comes to using Blender nodes but figuring out what parts I had to solve and actively testing out the setups made it more fun than usual. I feel like stuff like the RGB Colormask node would be a mainstay in my library and I hope to work on more node based stuff in the future. Below are a series of images breaking down the material setup itself.

Using Substance

I made some tilables with Substance Designer starting with the seat cushions with a result that kinda looks like worn down sci-fi fabric (or so I hope), then I brought it into Painter to add to the main cushion material. I used a mix of edge dirt generators with a few hand painted masking/painting in some spots to get the look I was going for.

Decal Workflow

The way I went about making decals in Blender was to use DECALmachine to get the initial normals from the modelled trimsheet, then used the maps in Substance Designer to create dirt & edge wear masks to use later. In the earlier explanation of the node setup there was a series of masks I combined to match the edgewear in both Uv_2 (0-1 bake UV) & Uv_3 (trim normals UVs).

New Things To Learn

I would like to learn more about worldbuilding & to set up a UE4 scene that allows me to try out new tools and setups within a project. I also want to get better at refining my general hard-surface workflow. There are things like building up a proper material/decal library that would be nice to learn more about & use in future projects.

Inspiration

I find inspiration by going through Pinterest and Artstation. Other mediums that also inspire me include films, shows and games. Grabbing a quick screenshot from a movie and using that as reference for a potential future project was something I started doing a while back and building a visual library of movie stills is useful for finding a mood, lighting setup or a vista for your next project.

Feedback

I try to seek feedback from Discord groups (Experience Points, Beyond Extent, DiNusty, etc.) and general friend circles. It's pretty easy to get tunnel vision during a project and staring at something for too long can make you miss things that could potentially be added, improved or removed. It's always best to seek a different perspective on things you're not 100% on so you can gain a new insight on a project or task.

Future Work

I plan to go through the backlog of modelling time lapses and clips and post them to my YouTube channel soon. Also there's the Kowloon project that I plan on making updates on that properly explains the project in parts. It's not something that has anything to do with gamedev but I am very proud with how much progress the project has made since its start.

Outro

Information can only go as far as those who hear it. I hope this breakdown gives a good enough perspective on how I tackle this type of CRT models and if you’re interested in learning more about the various other aspects hard surface modelling, these links/tutorials are a great start:

Fundamentals of Modular Kits - Luan Vetoreti

Modeling a Scifi Helmet in Blender - Rachel Frick

Substance Texturing Tutorial - JRO Tools

Trim Sheet Tutorial - Shawnell Priester

Advanced Tiling Techniques For Environmental Design - Alex Senechal