VW Bus Micro Scene
*Bus model provided by Connor Zelinsky
The bus. The Volkswagen bus was a three week assignment that was a real test of advanced UVing. The bus itself was provided without UVs and then 4 additional props needed to be modeled and UVed before all going into painter. For my scene I used Unity to render because of its ease of use and because it will be helpful in my later game development classes. The model was quite complicated with a lot of small detail and parts as well as having an interior and exterior to contend with. The windows needed to be see through and the interior of the bus needed to look appealing.
The bus was the most difficult and time consuming project of the semester. Many of the pieces were quite complex and not easy to see where the cuts were needed to make a proper UV shell. One piece that was particularly difficult was the driver side door frame that proved to be extremely tricky. I was able to get it fixed with some help in office hours and finding the correct edge loop. We had a few different materials that we can use to put together the bus and each one was filled almost completely and with uniform texel density, which was a nice accomplishment early on.
It was not easy to get everything to fit properly but I did make use of tiling when I could which helped for saving space within each 0-1 space. I made use of a lot of duplicating and using negative scale to get the bus snapped together and looking good for painter. The model itself was fun but it was extremely time consuming and difficult in many areas. The doors, hinges, and headlights were troublesome because of the multiple objects for each one and required diligent cutting and sewing to get a proper shell. I spent most of my time UVing the bus and getting it organized in different materials. The time quickly flew by and I had to make up the time later on in the assignment. I got frustrated with many of the objects which slowed me down but the lesson learned was to do as much as possible when sitting down at the computer, rather than do it in small pieces.
After solving the bleed issues it was pretty smooth sailing and I used alpha stamps to add detail to the tombstone and doors. Overall, I was pretty happy with my goth van. DOF was again a bit tricky in Unity but got it to work to focus on my candle. One strange thing I never solved was that from certain angles when looking through the windows parts of the bus would disappear. I recruited some help but it was unclear what was causing it.
The assignment was very difficult and taxing but I got it done and was pleased with the end result. I needed to UV the bus much earlier because some pieces were fairly simple and I could do the harder ones later. The positive was that I feel I can UV almost anything now.
All 3 UV sets for the bus utilizing tiling
Once the bus was done it was time to get some new objects modeled. I really like how they turned out and although they were simple they complimented the Goth van that I was going for. I used the revolve tool for the candle base and the goblet while the tombstone and coffin were created using a reference plane and adjusting vertexes. They were fun to model and I had some good references. No problems except for having to redo the coffin a few times to get it looking right.
Once everything was into painter it went pretty smoothly. I did not like how my bus ended up looking at the front because it looked to metallic even though I was going for a matte black look. I really liked the interior fabric that I used as well as the wood for the coffin. I had significant bleeding from my color ID so I had to rebake a few times and adjust AA. I decided to only bake it on the maps that I felt really required it, like curvature.
Candle, coffin, goblit and tombstone
Render in Unity with all my objects
DOF shot of the candle in Unity