Quadbot Shading

by - 2012/04/25 22 Comments Production

Here’s the first shading pass on the QuadBot.

The texture consists of 3 main parts.

1. Non-specific patterns (grunge and stuff) mapped with something called blended box mapping. i’ll write a post explaining blended box map soon.

2. A dirt map. We have a nice batch baker that bakes out AO and inverted AO. Nicolò wrote about it earlier (/artwork/shading-tests-dirtmaps/). I used that as a base and painted on top of it. This is mapped with automatic Smart UVs.

3. Lastly specific maps. This is something that only certain objects need, so it is mapped with a proper UV and blended in with an alpha in the material.

For painting I used Blender and GIMP. Unfortunately GIMP on Ubuntu is giving me a lot of problems while painting. For some reason every 5th stroke or so want to explode into space! Pablo, Sergey and Francesco all tried to help out, but unfortunately they were not able to fix it. If anyone knows how to fix it then please let me know.

  1. vitos1k says:

    omg! that’s awesomenesss!!!
    great work on textures and shaders! keep it up!

  2. EnV says:

    Hi Kjartan, sadly seems there is no fix for the exploding tablet issue in Gimp under last Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10, it’s probably a Unity related issue. I had to revert to Ubuntu 10.10 to use Gimp.

    Great work with the bot textures.

    • PhysicsGuy says:

      I have had similar issues using a inkscape with a tablet using the unity interface. Switching to Xubuntu helped, however, that gave me problem with the cut-and-paste buffer. Under Mint 12 I don’t have those issues with my tablet. So it indeed seems to be a unity issue

  3. timh says:

    I had the same problem with atom tablets with an early ubuntu Precise. I think there was a hot fix for gimp that disabled the event history, but what I did was switching to a newer X11 (via xorg-edgers ppa). I think the latest precise X11 works as well.

    Keep up that excellent work, guys!

    Tim

  4. stephen says:

    Blended box mapping post would be very very much appreciated. Very nice job by the way, looking great.

  5. Teun says:

    Can we get a higher resolution version of the image to use as wallpaper?

  6. 3pointedit says:

    Did you have to unwrap the whole thing or paint onto mesh?

  7. Knochi says:

    +1 on the Highres Wallpaper version. Dual Monitor would be fine as well.
    I will replace my Prometheus Wallpaper! ;-)

  8. Rogério Perdiz says:

    Hey, Regarding the Gimp problem I’ve solved it by installing Gimp 2.6.12 and I’ve tried the 2.7.4 that also works (fixing that issue that is), but then there is other bugs.

  9. Joris says:

    This is amazing…this is a kick-ass quadbot.
    Great texturing and lighting.
    I can’t wait to see it in action.

  10. TFS says:

    That there QB needs some good old mother nature dents in it

  11. Are the parts of the quadbot individual objects grouped and parented and rigged and such, or is it one mesh with many parts?

    • kjartan says:

      QuadBot consist of 554 objects. 1162 objects with all the bolts :P
      As far as i know Jeremy is parenting the objects to bones yes.

  12. Christoph Pöhler aka Dracio says:

    Amasing Texture
    what mith be a very good idear is a final test with Tracking and animation…

    okay toe be perfectly honest I realy wont to see MORE of the Robot its a wonderfull model and brillant rigg and the paining amsing caus it suports the model and adds the extra “robot in use factor”

  13. wafa says:

    Cute. What is his name ?

  14. mookie says:

    How long did it take to render highres? It looks really great, I mean it.

  15. Iso says:

    Awesome, Blended box mapping! I first learned about it a few years back from a Gnomon training video on hard surface texturing by Neil Blevins. He also describes it on the tutorial section of his webpage (http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/cg_education.htm).

    I’m very excited to see that your workflow involves general texturing (blended box maps, dirt maps, etc.) overlayed with specific texturing (UVW maps). This is such a powerful workflow.

    I’m also very curious to know how you went about building a blended box map shader in Blender. I’ve had success implementing it via nodes in Blender Internal and Cycles. I’m just curious to know how you did it. Maybe, it’s a better approach that I could adopt for future projects.

    Well done. It is evident by your work that you are a genuine asset to the Mango team!

  16. I had exactly the same gimp+tablet problem – I fixed it by upgrading to Gimp 2.8rc1