Behind the Scenes: Back to the Future

There are some popular culture themes, that are timeless and deserve tributes. From time to time, I like to treat myself and allow to reach for a? low-hanging fruit and depend on established icons instead of my own creativity.

This week, it was time to revisit Back to the Future. I made a low poly DeLorean a waaay back when I was starting my 3d portfolio and it felt exciting to go back and try to create it in a new, more detailed way. I imagined doing a whole animated scene, including the time travel jump followed by fire tracks. Unfortunately, the vehicle took so much of my time, that I decided for simple loop animation.

Visit the full Pinboard here

Even though this is a well known subject and all I needed to start was a blueprint, I went through reference gather and sketch anyway. Mostly to get into the vibe of the scene, but the sketch has another great effect. Even though its rough around the edges, it forces you to study your object for a while and get to know it in details, before you jump into modeling.

I focused my search primarily on the vehicle itself from multiple angles and various zoom levels to make sure, I get all the important details. Also, I picked the parking lot as the target location, simply because it's the most iconic scene with the first time travel attempt.

After quite intense? 5 hour modeling session, I had the vehicle ready and unwrapped, prepared for texturing. I created two materials, one for the vanilla car and the second for all the time machine mods. When exported as fbx to Substance Painter, it creates a separate texture set for each material, so this way I can use the DeLorean without the modifications if needed in the future (no, not that future).

With the car ready, environment presented a little challenge, mostly because I wanted to avoid the texture repetition on the road and needed a lot of markings for the surface. Luckily, Substance Painter makes this a breeze and you can easily layer multiple asphalt materials and paint them on top of each other including their roughness and normal maps, so after few clicks, the road was ready. Also, placing the paint lines on the road as decals is easy in Painter.

Finally, I assembled everything in Blender, add a filler building from Substance model library, used a night street HDRI, added few lamps and the rest was mostly about placing additional lights around the car to bring out the contours and details. Because completely realistic lighting is often boring.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.

See you in the next one! :)