Nuts And Bolts

Personal project

A wooden planked floor with a lot of items laying on it. In the top-left corner there's a large aluminium radiator with double brown and tan fans. At the bottom lies a red and orange Phillips screwdriver. On the right side is a short, but fat, opened red coffee can labeled "Uncle Gonzales' Whole Bean Coffee". Between the items there are a lot of nuts, bolts, screws and washers scattered around.

The goal of the project was to establish a pipe between the first version of 3D Coat featuring PBR texture painting, and Houdini’s Mantra pathtracer. At that time Houdini didn’t have Disney Principled shader yet.

Screwdriver, CPU cooler, coffee can and all types of nuts and bolts were modeled in NVil and hand-painted in 3D Coat. Instruction manual visible on one of the renders is a scanned page from Noctua NH-D14 manual applied on an FFD’d grid. All models were made with render-time subdivision in mind.

For scattering nuts and bolts throughout the scene and into the can I used a funnel collider through which I poured Bullet RBDs from a wide box emitter. It worked pretty well, but position of several objects outside of the can still required a little bit of tweaking, so I ended up baking the simulation result into geometry and manually adjusting their transforms.

Tools

3D Coat NVil xNormal Bitmap2Material Houdini