The Promotion Update 1 (Patreon)

Blender production of The Promotion has officially begun! I haven't been doing updates as consistently with posters and loops since I've just posted them when ready. Weekly updates should be back now that there is a larger project.

First order of business is the scenebuild (pictured above). The original scenebuild was actually made in SFM while The Normandy's Bitch was still in production. I don't think I posted it back then since it wasn't the main project. It's a fairly simple Alliance style room, so it wasn't difficult to rebuild it in Blender. 

I've ported all the props used for the build, and the shaders are fairly simple so far. I've mostly just applied the diffuse and normal maps. I have been able to use Blender's metallic shader for the walls and ceilings for a better shine. The hologram models also have the benefit of emission shaders, so they can act as a source of light. Another technique I tried was with the floor texture. The floor is just one model, with the texture on repeat 3x3. It's slightly easier to work with than using 9 floor models.

There are some benefits to modelling as well. Since Blender is a modelling program, there is a lot more you can do. In SFM, you can only scale entire objects. In Blender, you can scale on any axis individually. This has been really helpful for scenebuilding. Some of the wall and ceiling models only needed scaling in one axis to fit together. Speaking of scaling, Blender also has imperial/metric units. This is helpful to make everything consistent. SFM only scales an object based on a percentage of it's original size. This is technically the same for Blender, but it will actually tell you the size of the object you're working with. That way, you can scale two separate wall models and make sure they come out to the exact same height. In general, it's just useful because you can quickly scale something to it's real world size. Overall, porting all the props from SFM is a tedious process, but Blender makes for better scenebuilding.

Next up is posing out all the scenes and writing the script. I have some of the scenes posed out in SFM, but I'll need to repose them and finalize everything in Blender. I don't think this will take a full week to do, so the next update might be earlier than that.