Week 3

 The main goal of week 3 was, ultimately, to get the camera as close to finished as humanly possible, as it's the focal piece of my scene. I wanted to get it textured and good to go as soon as I could. 

 This meant I had to  finish the build itself (the flash, the shutter release, and the film chamber release), which I managed to do and then eventually get baked out into Substance Painter within a day.

It did take a lot of tweaking, with the Shutter Release being more troublesome than any other part of the camera. However, I eventually went in and rebuilt it to have a smoother curvature, which in turn caused less edge 'frilling'. 

Once the main build was done, the first port of call was to look at what, exactly, the texture of a polaroid camera is. 

I don't own one, and i have no access to such an expensive piece of kit, so I did the next best thing and created a material reference sheet using google image search. This included even looking into colour variations of polaoid cameras.

The first thing I noticed is that polaroid cameras aren't, in actual fact, smooth -- but are instead made of a grainy plastic. It's very subtle, but it serves the purpose of making the camera easy to grip onto while shooting. So before I did anything, I found a Normal Map on Google Images and implemented it, so it would lie under any further materials I would apply. 

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/158962/grainy-texture-from-distance

 

From there I layered up different textures in order to get the effect I needed, including using  Planar projection, Cylindrcal projection, and UV-Layout projection; each of them giving a different effect that would be useful to the model depending on where, exactly, it was used.

One notable place was when texturing the rings inside of the camera lens. I used a striped material without any colour -- only using the height and normal maps, and then grouped it together with a steel material. which in turn resulted in the exact effect I needed once I reset the scaling and various settings to what I needed them to be. 

After I got the base textures down, it was time to move onto the details. I used a combination of Generators that I masked out, and Alphas to get the desired effect.

Of course, as this is supposed to be set in a somewhat fictional place (Life is Strange is loosely based on real places and brands) so I didn't make an exact recreation. This was on purpose, to show a tiny amount of creative license while staying relatively true to the source content I did, however, make the decision to keep the polaroid rainbow stripe and branding. 

The rainbow was hand-painted, using the snap-to-axis function in Substance Painter (Ctrl + Right Click + Drag) to enable me to draw a straight line using my tablet and pen -- using colours directly from the polaroid website that I selected using the eyedropper tool. 

Then, of course, the branding itself -- this was a little more difficult to figure out, but ultimately I managed to figure it out in Adobe Photoshop, exporting a colour image on a transparent background for the material and a white silhouette with a black background as the alpha for each.

Polaroid Alpha

Polaroid Textures

Butterfly Sticker Alpha

 

 

 

Butterfly Sticker Texture

 

For details I had to make myself, I downloaded a font similar to the one Polaroid use and finalised the stuff I was missing (the 600 on the print flap, the outlining of the panels, the branding imprint on the back of the camera). And just like that, my focal asset was done. 

  

 

 

Overall I am pleased with the result of this week's work.

Next week I plan on getting the rest of the assets done, blocked out at least in a diarama, and to start work on creating the alphas for the butterfly wings.