Stylized 3D Scene Timelapse/Tutorial (Blender, Substance Painter)

I can`t say it`s a proper tutorial, but it`s possible to get the idea. First of all, I`d like to emphasize how much inspiration the work of photographer Langdon Clay has been for me. This artwork is based on his photograph called “White Tower Car, Buick LeSabre, Meatpacking District, 1976“. This cold alienating atmosphere is exactly what I was looking for. This is a story of several mistakes that occurred in the process, which ultimately led to a result with which I am pretty satisfied. But the whole workflow could be easily optimized. The first mistake was thinking that I could paint this picture from scratch. I’m not skilled in drawing , so instead, I decided to first model the entire scene in Blender and then paint on 3D models using Substance Painter. The second mistake was handling the lighting. I thought I could simply paint it by hand. However, the problem lies in the complex interplay of all the surfaces interacting with each other in the scene. It turned out that it’s better to first assign base colors to all the models, carefully set up the lighting, and bake the lighting onto the texture in Blender for each individual object. This allows you to import all the textures into Substance Painter and paint on top of the existing textures, where all the reflections and lighting are accurately baked. Here begins the real creative process, where you feel that the experiment will indeed turn out to be successful. Afterward, I imported all the painted textures from SP back into Blender, rendered the final version, and realized that it looked like crap. The baked/painted base color lacked reflections, making the image appear very flat. Fortunately, I could render the reflections as a separate pass, which I later added in Photoshop as a separate layer. The final step was painting over the assembled render. At this stage, I began to wonder if it was a mistake to go into Substance Painter and paint there, considering that I would still be painting over it in Rebelle Pro in the end. I don’t know, maybe it added something to the overall look. And finally, the weirdest and dumbest part. I had it in my mind that I would make a short timelapse of the entire process. As usual, the question arose: what music should I put in the background? I decided it wouldn’t be a problem to compose it myself and stuck with that idea. However, the final video turned out to be 16 minutes long, and I had only one day to write music for the entire video (I managed to compose just 7 minutes of it and looped the rest). So, at times, the music sounds cheap because I rushed through this process. I used the following additional models that I found on Sketchfab: Low Poly Car - Buick LeSabre 1975 Sitting Girl Eric Rigged 001 - Rigged 3D Business Man Man in a business suit is sitting 0240 Karol Wojtyła’s hat Baked goods Cashier Coffee machine 00:00 Intro 00:26 Painting in Rebelle Pro 00:51 Scene assembling in Blender 01:10 Test in SP 01:20 Modelling in Blender 02:00 Ground sculpting in ZBrush 02:57 Ground painting in SP 03:54 Blender 06:56 Girl sculpting & Painting 08:12 Scene painting in SP 11:04 Blender 11:50 Painting in Rebelle Pro #blender #blendertutorial #blendertimelapse #stylizedart