Sony TC-D5 Pro 2 recorder
With all the work I have done so far, the one thing I've never truly attempted is anything photo-realistic. I've done high poly and always had the caveat of being able to downscale texture res for game use. In this case, no more!
Coming in at a CPU bending 1.2 million in the high poly baked down to a "mere" 300k in the low poly, this Sony D5 was split across 7 texture sets for maximum resolution and UV space, all painted and rendered in Substance Painter. This was my first time using Iray and I've been very impressed with the results as it's often overlooked for dedicated software. I do wish standalone lights could be added when rendering, though that might be somewhat of a pipedream.
In terms of things learned with this 2 month long project, the main takeaways for this project are:
-Pick something you can take apart if needs be, there are only so many references!
-Spread out construction, burnout is a real threat
-It's better to be too detailed than not enough and regretting it.
Its taken far longer than any other project I've ever created, but I think it was worth it.
Same render as before with some more experimental and more vintage colour correction.
Of thanks as well is the owner of the cassette tape, acquired freely from: https://www.cgtrader.com/items/487726/download-page
Reunwrapped with 3ds Max and retextured with Substance Painter 2.
Black and white is awesome at highlighting detail and lighting interactions in 3D.
Post process FX achieved with a combination of chromatic abberation, DOF, grain and minor adjustments to brightness and contrast in Photoshop. This is due to Iray's currently limited post render pipeline.
Better view of the cassette tape, created in collaboration with CG trader.com. Originally it was designed for use with procedural textures and required extensive modification and retexturing to get the final look.
Snapshot from 3ds Max
The hardest part was ensuring a cleanfit between the many parts as they were individually worked on. For the most part this was successful, however if you look close enough, some issues remain...
Clay render, complete with normal detailing.
4k texture downscaled to 2k. Just because I was using a high resolution is no excuse for bad unwraps.