Crowbar 3D (Blog)

7/30/26

Portfolio Polish: Pt. 4

M-777: Model Finished

I'm done, I'm giving up forever... April fools! I've completed the model as far as I would like it for now. Here are some UE5 renders. And Marmoset renders for wireframes.

Barrel

Body

7/28/26

Quite behind on my portfolio stuff (lead duties, cinematic work and outside responsibilities), but that's nothing to sulk about, I do have great progress. I've kicked down the low poly of my M-77 down to 61.9K total. Squeezed out as much texel density as possible for the two UV maps. I was able to get a nearly perfect bake.

Barrel

Body

7/14/26

Portfolio Polish: Pt. 1

Portfolio Polish Pt. 1

For the final project, I will not be taking up any new undertakings. Instead, I'm going to go back and polish what I've got to portfolio level quality. For a lot of these need work here and there to get them to the stretch goals I originally intended. I'll be prioritizing more leisure work first, then pushing to pieces that need a lot more work.

As my friend says, "In a hundred-mile journey, the first ninety mile is merely half of it."

Below I've dedicated a good chunk of time to properly assessing scope and planning out which projects I should be tackling first. For this, I used Notion. Each thumbnail is a page of its own, with a set plan. Because I'm tackling multiple projects, and refining with knowledge that I've accumulated over my time at FIEA, this journey will most likely go beyond the final submission (probably into Ventures).

AI-Assisted Planning Page

Starting with the EH-Sattelite

Going back and cleaning bake

7/07/26

Part 4: Interactability

Currently sick right now :( But I was able to get a lot of work done, it's a bit all over the place, but I wanted to touch base on some other aspects of the project.

Trying out different lighting

In-Engine Topology

BP for Nitrogen Release

Hitbox and Trigger func.

Second Pass in Substance

MRI Brain Scan Texture

6/30/26

Part 3: Texturing and Simulation

Part 3: Tex and Sim

Done modeling, got some early textures and experimenting with the cold head nitrogen release sequence. Testing out some methods how I could do the smoke, flipbooks, animated texture arrays, or openVDBs. Substance painter recently updated and broke everything to no one's surprise, so I had to restart multiple times.

Good program 👍

Flipbook

Texture Array (GIF)

OpenVDB (Physical Smoke)

Material First Pass

6/23/26

Part 2: Hi-Res and UVs

Haven't got to a first bake yet, but I'm practically already there, using the CAD refacet, I was able to get down to 21k as a first pass without any effort. Making good progress.