Radiator

Within my group I was selected to develop the benchmark asset for our last presentation before development begins. This asset happened to be the one of two radiators from Francis Bacon's studio. I had to look through multiple references of the room to get a clear image of what I was going to create, as in all of the images, the radiator was not the centre piece and was fairly obscured from view. I managed to find some images to work from and began the creation process. While I was modelling I was trying to keep the poly count as low as I could, as this radiator had many gaps of which would increase poly count for the rest of the geometry, I tried to give the panels the same basic shape, hoping that I would be able to bake the groves and more detailed areas on later. I first modelled the individual panel, which I could duplicate and then merge once I had spaced them all out.

Further into development I had created a basic low poly version of the mesh, though however there were disagreements on the appearance from within the group, as some members thought that the panels curved outwards, while I had modelled it with the belief that they curved inwards. Being hard to tell from the reference images, I opted to agree and go for this alternate appearance, as it also held a more traditional radiator look. Changing it proved more time consuming than I had hoped, as if I needed to change how one panel looked, I would have to repeat the process a total of 108 times over the mesh. I believed that redoing a large portion of the work would actually be quicker, and I instead went back to the single panel and changed it there. From this stage, I would have to repeat the previous processes I had done to get the first version of the mesh. Before I did this however, I detached areas of the radiator that I could later stick back onto the newer version.

When it came to the UV stage, I needed to keep to our agreed upon 10.24 texel density. The problem was that this mesh had quite a large surface area once you count all 54 panel faces which themselves are quite large. I also did not want to use an extreme texture size, so the only alternative was to stack many of the shelves. I needed to keep into consideration that these panels would later have paint applied to them and if repeated too many times, or in close proximity it would look very unnatural. I found the highest amount of texture stacks I could use in a 1k space, so that it would increase variation along the radiator. I had to decide which shells to place on which stack so that they were spread far enough apart from each other and at random areas of the radiator, keeping it from looking like a repeating pattern.

When it came to the texturing stage in substance painter, I was able to clearly see how the repeating stacked panels would look, and by testing some paint splats, it looked pretty good, and if adding only smaller spread out paint drips, the repetition could certainly go unnoticed. I gave the radiator a certain amount of wear, scratches and rust, aswell as a fairly light edgeware, that really helped define the more shallow grooves that I wasn’t sure would be picked up. For the paint, which was primarily on the top, I added some very faded but large paint splats, on top of this adding a large variety of paint splats and colours. These two effects made it look like the radiator had been in this room for years collecting paint of which looked newer and newer on top. I also added a faint level of dust to the top of all areas of the radiator as a finishing touch.