Creating Weathered Portable Tape Player in Blender & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hey, I’m Sean Phillips, a 3D Environment Artist. Currently, I work at Industrial Light and Magic in the Interactive Media division. I have been an environment artist for 9 years. I’ve worked on projects like Pixar’s Coco VR, Spider-Man: Far From Home VR, Amazon Prime Video VR, Star Wars: Tales from Galaxy’s Edge (and the enhanced edition), and Luki and the Lights.

The Potify Deck was a concept by Sheng Lam that I always wanted to model, and finally sat down to do it. For all my personal projects, I like to set a specific goal/skill to work on. With this one, I wanted to work on my hard-surface modeling and texturing skills.

References

ALWAYS GATHER REFERENCES! Even if in your heart of hearts, you remember what something looks like, gather it, even if it’s just to reinforce what you know. It’s even more important when you want to achieve a more realistic style. For this one, the biggest things I was looking for from references, since I already had a concept, were the overall scale of portable tape players, plugs in audio equipment, switches on tape decks, and any sigs and symbols.

Modeling

For this, I used the basic high-poly to low-poly method. Since I didn’t need to do any sculpting, it was extremely easy to get my low-poly out of it. I build the high-poly, remove all modifiers, delete all details that can be baked down, and optimize the mesh to get my low-poly. First, start with a block-out to rough out the overall scale and slowly begin to build up your big shapes.

Then I start adding medium and smaller shapes.

After that, I like to put a basic material on all my parts, to use for my ID mask once we take it into Substance 3D Painter. Also, be sure to add it in the Viewport Display section. Alternatively, you can also use vertex painting to achieve the same purpose.

For the extruding bumps, I modeled them out, assigned a vertex group to the edges, shrinkwrap it to the main mesh it’s sitting on top of, bevel, subdivide, and run a data transfer with the source being the underneath mesh. It gives the edges in the vertex group the same normals and blends into the bumps, so it appears to be one shape, even though it’s still separate geo.

UVs

For this, I wanted to maintain as high a fidelity as possible, as one would for a hero or cinematic object, so I used UDIMs. I split it up into 4 tiles, and arranged them almost as if they were material IDs. Also important, everything is close to the same texel density.

The biggest tip is to be mindful of your sharp edges. Making sure there are seams there will stop artifacts on your shard edges during the baking process.

Exporting & Baking

Even tho models are automatically triangulated wherever you’re taking them, I still like to triangulate my geo, just in case. Not all the programs have the same triangulation method, so results will differ from program to program. This way, you can avoid that.

I’m baking this in Substance 3D Painter, so I took advantage of their ‘by mesh name’ baking. Make sure your meshes share the same name, with ‘_low’ for low poly and ‘_high’ for high poly.

Texturing

I try to keep texturing relatively straightforward. The first thing I always do, under shader parameters, is change the specular quality to very high or better. It will show, more accurately, how your object will light in other engines.

I start by putting down some basic materials and building up subtle surface imperfections. At this point, the goal is to add subtle variations in color and let the different roughness values do the heavy lifting.

Next, I add light wear, dirt, scratches, and more intentional imperfections. It’s always best to go back and hand-paint in/out different details to achieve a more natural look. For this, it was best not to be heavy-handed with everything. More “left used and left in a closet” and less “abandoned in a forest,” as we tend to do at times. The trick is layering light details until you get a nice look, and then hand-painting in detail to tell a story. All the text, painted logos, and some wear were done using projections; the same for bumps on the corner, fingerprints, dust wipes, light and shallow scuffs, etc. Also, be mindful of the type of material it is. Soft plastics and rubbers will be more prone to surface discoloration and hold on to more surface dirt than a harder plastic, glass, or metal.

Rendering

I rendered this in Marmoset Toolbag 5. The tricky part was getting the glass part to look the way I wanted.

For setting up the lights, I first find an HDRI that best suits the given prop. No matter where you render, always start with an HDRI. Then, I do a basic three-point lighting setup: a main light, a soft back light with a cooler color, and a soft fill light with a warmer color. The HDRI does the rest of the work. After that, in the camera, increase the MM to around 60, as it lets you view your prop in a better lens. I always change the Tone Mapper to ACES. It’s what movies use. It gives a better color output, but you will need to increase the exposure. After that, adjust your settings until it feels good to you. The Clarity slider is a superpower.

Post-Processing

Never skip this step. It’s the key to achieving beautiful, almost cinematic-like renders, and it doesn’t take that long anymore. For this, I use the Camera Raw Filter in Photoshop. It’s fairly straightforward to use. Try not to go too extreme, and it should quickly make your renders pop.

Conclusion

The main challenge I had on this project was having so much creative freedom on certain things. Outside of that, it was pretty straightforward. My goal was to bush myself and make something cool. I think the key to making a good prop is understanding what you’re making, on a real-world level.

If I had any advice for beginners, it would be… to always push yourself and be honest with yourself. The harder a scene or an asset is for you to make, the more opportunity you have to grow from it. And to be honest, it's about being able to see the areas you need to work on. If you can do those things, you’ll always improve.

Thanks for reading.