BB-8 Droid (Star Wars:TFA)

This is my first post to the Blender artist forum, I’ve been a lurker for a while as I’ve been learning Blender on my own time, and I think I’m finally getting to a level where I’m comfortable posting my works for critique alongside some of the amazing pieces I’ve seen here.


The first work I want to share is a BB-8 model I made recently. I like the Star Wars droids, the way they’re personified is just cute, so I decided to make one in Blender. I’ve been working on practising texturing especially recently, and this was a great way to do it.

[P3D]8SHiM[/P3D]


This was just a generic movie poster style render. I think it looks nice, although I noticed when bringing in the textures, they ended up warped. You can see it around the metal details, the smooth curves of the panel ended up wavy. That’s never happened before or since, so I’m not sure what I might have done to my UV’s.


This is by far my favourite render of this model. I’m using Andrew Price’s technique for compositing models onto backgrounds, and using an HDR from this location. This is the closest to “photo real” I managed to get the model, although trying to match the colours with the background proved to be tricky. I still think he’s perhaps slightly too blue-cast.


This is my second favourite render of the model. I think he turned out a little bright because I was cheating to get harsher shadows in Cycles. I would turn down the exposure in the render settings, and turn my lamp brightness way up. It made the shadows harsher, but also made it harder to match to the background. I tried to colour correct, and even tried to use the vectorscope in the image viewer, didn’t quite work.


This represents about 5 hours of work, most of which was spent texture painting using Substance Painter. There’s actually very little work done in the mesh geometry (as you can see from the P3D model), almost all of the actual detail comes from the texture maps (which are 4096x4096 on the full res model). I’m also using a PBR Shader nodegroup to take advantage of SP’s Metal/Rough maps, which I explain here.

Overall, I’m quite happy with it. It’s not the most detailed model in the world, and there are some issues with UV warping which I don’t quite understand, but as a practice model trying to approach photo-realism, I think it worked rather well.

I’d love any feedback or critiques to make this model better! Thanks!

It’s really good. You made the right choice by focusing on textures rather than geometry. My one critique is the paint texture. Rather than looking like worn out paint, it looks like it was painted to appear worn out, like a poorly constructed movie prop. This is due to the specularity/material of the chipped/worn areas being the same as the still painted areas (which you knew, I’m sure). But overall, I like it! Great representation.

On a second look, I realize you did apply different specularity, but I’m not sure the effect is strong enough. It could just be the p3d representation though. My mistake!

I’ll admit, I had to google the model. I’m not one for the new Star Wars. However, the model is nice.

I think you’d add more if you could add some motion to the bottom - spin - in the background settings. It sort of looks rather “splat - here I am”. As if the model was dropped into the images otherwise.

Looks fantastic good job! Where did you learn to add your render to a real picture and make it look, Real. Is there a website you learned it from? Please let me know, Thanks!

This looks very interesting. You’ve managed too make it fit well in the photos, especially in the first one (not the poster, the other one), even though it’s not a setting you would see in the films. I like the overall mood of the pictures.

Are you planning on making some of the other droids as well? I would love to see them.

looking nice so far. I like how you incorporated the model into an actual photo, the size, shadow etc looks very realistic. On the model the texture looks like it was just painted on and then randomly smudged, the 3 black vertical lines in the front center looks like it was done by hand as the lines is very wobbly. I would also suggest a bump, diffuce or perhaps extruding the geometry a bit on the orange sections to make it look like there is different geometry and not just painted area’s. As this droid rolls around a lot, a couple of scratch streaks would also add to the effect. As mentioned before the effect of the specular map also does not come through clear enough.