The Super Destroyer
My involvement with the ship evolved over time. For the majority of the project I served as an outsource lead artist, ensuring external vendor teams had the necessary information and were operating efficiently and at the project’s quality bar.
However, we encountered a challenge in aligning with the outsourcing team on the proposed ship’s production timeline. Rather than relying on the vendor to align with our strategy, I switched to developing the asset internally.
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I divided the Destroyer's exterior into four sections: the bow, the midsection, the stern and the weapons. I enlisted three other internal artists to collaborate, assigning them to work on the geometry for the primary and secondary shapes on the bow, stern and weapons, while I focused on the midsection. I had everyone work synchronously via remote screen sharing, with our project manager joining to provide support and motivation through the extended hours.
Once the exterior's secondary shapes and preliminary UV shells were established, the other artists transferred their sections to me. I integrated these components and laid out the UVs across multiple material sets. The other artists had to transition back to their other projects and I took to working on the tertiary detailing of the entire exterior.
My approach involved creating a two-dimensional modular texture sheet, which served as the foundation for a three-dimensional modular detail kit. This kit was then strategically applied across the ship's surface, particularly in areas requiring intricate detailing, such as the interior of the forward arms and the nose. This process, alongside the UV layout, proved to be the most time-consuming aspect of the project.
At this stage, we were utilizing a material ID workflow. The remaining tasks consisted of importing the asset into Substance Painter and carefully painting the material IDs for each section as well as painting in some of the panels into the normal map. I completed all of this in just about over two weeks, significantly contrasting the vendor's multi-month estimate.
