☛ Yes! We have no bananas. ☚

Here are the references I gathered for my phone, I didn’t bother with the back of it as this item is usually wall mounted. At this stage I also break it down into the basic shapes, so I know how I’m going to handle the object.

Here’s a quick beak down and the shapes I went in thinking about. Now, formally, I would have made the lowpoly first, then make a highpoly - but that approach was a lot more time consuming and now I prefer to start with a High poly. So the goal with the highpoly, no matter if you make it in zBrush, Maya, 3DsMax, Blender - is to capture the form and all the details that are best not left to normals in your preferred texturing program. Things are generally nicer if you can model them in, however, some details are best left to the texturing stage as well (I usually use alphas in substance painter for things such as ornamentation, or small things that don’t impact the silhouette that are just easier to do at that stage. TIP: When beveling edges to get a nice clean look, it’s often best to exaggerate them somewhat, this will produce a better normal map in the long run.

So here was my High Poly, and you can see there are some details I intentionally left out, as they’d just take too long to model and I can do them easily in Substance Painter. I could have also left the main dial to substance painter if I really needed to, but as it was a central focus I decided not to.

The next stage is the lowpoly, this is when you need to make things nice and clean. It’s usually the most useful to place the object on a reference layer that can’t be selected (this is the maya term not sure what it is in any other program) then model the lowpoly over top of it. TIP: When using cylinders keep the side amount a multiple of 4, usually mine are from 20-32. This makes it easy to step up and step down if something’s looking too chunky.  

I tend to make things a little too lowpoly, but I’d say look out for things that don’t break the silhouette too much, they can often be left to the normal map. Think things like nails, small indents and grooves, a detailed pattern that is subtle, small holes etc. 

Next would be UV mapping, my first and foremost goal here is to minimise seams. This means make as few shells (or islands) as possible. See what you can sew together (within reason). Sometimes, with the texture process in mind, I might divide some shells just to make my life easier. Also keep the shell size relative, give a lot of room for bigger parts and shrink down the small parts you hardly see.

Here is the UV map for the phone, I wasn’t too happy with the main body of the phone (it seemed to warp a little too much) but it produced no problems with the normal map etc. baking so I … left it. I’ve also been told to not let cylindrical UVs ‘curve’ like they do here, so since this project I’ve been fixing that. I won’t speak too much about UVing because there are SO MANY tutorials out there, just hit up youtube if you’re stuck!

Here is the result of my Lowpoly, with my normal map and AO map applied. (These were baked and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag which I’m finding VERY useful in this regard!) I could have made the actual object lower, but since this was a portfolio piece I allowed the higher poly count (3,058 Tris).

Now, with my maps (Normal, AO, Curvature, and World Space Normal), I move into Substance Painter! For a complex object you may need to bake an ID map, I might suggest baking that in the same project you bake everything else just so it is similar to the others. This will help you separate all the different materials quickly. 

Here is all the groups, the normal map layer (notice the text and holes in the speaker), and the first stencils in the dial. I do these things first just out of preference, you can put the stencils on at any stage.

This shows my groups and layers. I won’t go too far into texturing (again, youtube has SO MUCH on Substance Painter), but if it’s organised like this you can turn off groups you’re not working on if the project starts to slow down. One thing I find you need to look out for is the roughness of your materials, as this can really make or break the look of something. Go back to your references and check how smooth something is and how much it reflects, it’s the important difference between metal and plastic etc. Material distinction and values are two important things to look at, try not to give each material the same value (make your image B&W to evaluate this). Here you can see I have two layers on top just to further work the roughness as well as the sense of wear to the piece, which is also an important element to give it personality. For this piece I ended up hand painting (and then working away) some of the dirt layer to get it just where I wanted it. 

After that, since this was a portfolio piece, the next step was making some SUPER NICE renders that look good in a portfolio. You can get pretty wild with these, put in as many lights as needed to get some nice reflections etc. Just because this is just for some beauty shots, and it’s really to showcase your prop.