Behind The Scenes: Star Wars Endor (Patreon)

I've already done some SW pieces in the past and didn't want to go back to remaking or updating the models (thought it might be something to enjoy next time). Instead I wanted to create a new model and push it a bit further than previous ones.

I had a hard surface textured bike model in my list for a long time and never had the right motivation to do it. Until now. So this time, instead searching for inspiration and being creative with the theme. I went the other way around and found a theme suitable for the technical solution I wanted to make. So instead of a regular bike, I set out to make a speeder bike from the Return of the Jedi.

This is a great way, how you can flip thing around sometimes. Do you have some particular new technique you want to try? Why not come up with a suitable theme, that would excite you and help you learn along the way?

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But the bike itself wouldn't be enough, so I've fired up the all mighty Pinterest and started searching for a good material. Apart from obvious speeder references from multiple angles and blueprints, I wanted more Endor moon (place, where the movie happens) reference to have a mood board for the forest look and feel, the lighting and color references and overall good sources to take inspiration from.

Originally, I thought I will focus on the speeder in the forest, but previous forest dioramas taught me, that it's almost impossible to make a good looking forest cutout diorama. You always miss something. If you include leaves, your trees are too small. If you just use the trunks and cut them at some height, the scene look a bit empty.

So I've decided to use only ground level foliage and build a part of the Imperial bunker as a secondary motive to fill the scene.

Especially at times like these, when you're unsure how the layout is going to look, the sketch can be quite essential. And again, it's never about how the sketch looks, but whether you solved your layout problems or not.

Here, the most obvious problem was the bunker, the fact that I wanted to include quite a bit of plants to support to forest mood and show bike at the same time. The bunker was simply too large of a structure, so I decided to try include only a corner of the building with half a door missing. 

It looked quite promising on the sketch, so I moved to sketch in some forest foliage and bike.

You can see on the final render, I left out the large tree trunk, but after building the models and basic layout, the surroundings would simply eat up all the attention meant for bike, so I've added one more and removed the trunk.

Using Substance Painter for texturing

For the bike itself, I used the standard hard surface modeling approach from my course using bevels and booleans and simply applied all the modifiers in the end. I've never done the hard surface textures yet, because there was never enough time to do a proper UV unwrap and let's be honest, the Smart UV Project in Blender is not so smart in many cases.

But recently I've noticed the auto-unwrap option in the Substance Painter, so I've decided to give it a spin and the results were really great. So the matter of UV unwrapping a complex hard surface model like tha bike, was resolved by checking one checkbox during import. (You have to of course reimport the model to Blender with the Substance generated UV's)

After that, it was all about applying few of the great Painter's smart materials, that generate all the edge wear, dirt and scratches, so this was really a few clicks texturing job. You can check it out in the process video.

You can watch the process video on Youtube
 

So that's it for the latest illustration and I hope it will help you with your own work.

See you in the next one! :)