Behind the Scenes: Touring Bicycle

INTRODUCTION

I'm Nick Sinclair, a 3D artist from Winnipeg, a mysterious and obscure city in Canada. I started using Blender when I got hired to work at Tangent Animation, the first studio to create feature animations with a Blender-based pipeline, including Next Gen and Maya & the Three. This marked the beginning of what I affectionately refer to as my Blender fanaticism.

INSPIRATION

Nothing compares to the supreme elegance of a hand-made steel-framed bicycle with ornate lugs. My goal was to make an elevated version of my own bike using vintage components and give it a clean but lived-in look.

PROCESS

I knew that Blender’s modifiers could handle a great deal of the heavy lifting in the modeling stage, so I only applied them when I was happy with the proportions and had set up all my UV seams.

MODELING

I modeled small segments of the crankset and used the Array modifier to complete the gears, controlling thickness with Solidify. I added all my UV seams before applying the modifiers to save time.

To make sense of the complicated arrangement of the spokes, I used color coding. After setting up the correct number of spokes in a radial array, I made the final position adjustments in edit mode.

I modeled a small tile-able square of the leather handlebar wrap and procedurally wrapped it around the handlebars.

This style of bike frame is brazed together and hand-sanded smooth, so I wanted to achieve a seamless look with my model. The lugs were modeled separately using shrink wrap and intersecting geometry as a reference for embellishments like the hearts before combining them into the various tubes of the bike to create a seamless bike frame.

Tying the fastback seat stays into the downtube lug was one of the most difficult feats of topology solving.

For the smaller braze-on elements of the bike (highlighted in orange), I gave myself a break and did not integrate them into the frame's topology.

TEXTURING

Shout out to UVPackmasterPro for making the uv packing process so easy. There is not much to say other than to treat yourself to this addon because it’s worth every penny.

My approach to texturing this project was to do a quick coverage pass on all the elements and then, back in Blender, I explored my compositions to find out which parts of the bike I would render close up on. This way, I specifically knew which areas needed more attention than others.

For this project, I used a hybrid UDIM setup (approximately 80 tiles). Larger objects like the bike frame had many UDIM tiles, while smaller things like the rear derailleur were set up in a legacy style. This file had 24 texture sets. I prefer these over a single-set UDIM layout because I find the performance bottlenecks much more manageable by hiding texture sets. The major drawback to this approach is that the process of importing all these texture sets into Blender was quite tedious.

If I had a time machine, I would have arranged my UVs in a traditional UDIM layout, carefully grouping UDIM tiles by materials while avoiding material overlap with the same tiles. This way, I could have had the texture sets in Substance Painter to make the file more manageable but also the ability to export the textures as one set by foregoing the $textureset tag and instead using the $mesh tag. This would have made importing the many textures into Blender much faster.

LIGHTING & COMPOSITION

I spent a great deal of time exploring the presentation of this bike. I tried posing it in furnished sets like a loft apartment but found those sets to be too restrictive for finding striking angles.

So, I opted for a more minimalist asset presentation style render with 3 lights, some cards, and no post-processing.

RENDER - Touring Bicycle

Fun fact: I added a cigarette to the Bluelug character as a subtle reference to the supremely talented artist Yan Blanco, with whom I had been working during the pandemic.

Thank you for reading. I hope this article inspires you to ride a bike! Feel free to ask any questions, and if you like my work, follow me on social media. Have a good day!

About the Artist                       

Nick Sinclair, a 3D artist with a fist full of sandwiches and strong opinions about Blender.