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Working in the indie sphere I got too used to cutting corners.
I wanted an industry-standard refresher, so I enrolled into a short mentorship with AMC Studio.

When teams are small and milestones come tumbling, you get in a mindset of getting things done at all cost. I felt like I never did a project where I emphasized end-product quality to the detriment of speed, so this here would be my exercise.

What to do?

Usually these sort of short mentorships favor props since they offer a good concentration of detail to tackle, but I already had a decade of experience.

To me it was an issue of assessment- revealing blindspots, undoing bad habits and fine-tuning.

Decisions decisions

I wanted something bigger, but I was well aware I'd be doing this in my spare time and wary of my tendency to fill my plate to burnout. Toned it down:

"What if instead of a vehicle I did a... smaller vehicle?"

Presto, problem solved.

Reference

I'm fascinated from 'Atomic Age' aesthetics, the corny space-race metal toys in particular really caught my eye. The base inspiration was a classic-looking bumpercar from the 1950s; luckily I found a website that had one up for sale with a very comprehensive photo set, showing me all angles.

Accuracy Process

I've used a method to replicate a 3D model accurately from a set of images using the discontinued Autodesk Image Modeler: a set of images are loaded and cameras with specific settings are assigned to each image. You then place a bunch of locators, points in space that are shared between the cameras/ images. You then adjust each locator's position in space by what you see in each image, and the network will ultimately give you the landmarks.

It's a painstaking process and only worth it if you need extreme accuracy. The precise number of people who cared that my bumpercar was life-accurate was ∅.

I've tried replicating this process with Perspective Plotter, an addon for Blender which does camera matching, but it only references one image. While working on this, I reached out to Mark Kingsnorth (the author of the plugin) to ask him about camera matching. He was interested in making a successor to Autodesk Image Modeller, since there's a demand for it.

After Action Review

Remembered AAA asset pipeline top-to-bottom, checked all the boxes

Deepened experience with Substance Painter, came up with some generator tricks, Passthrough layers and Anchor Points.

Tried Camera Matching → Control Points → Curves → Curves to Mesh workflow. Good option, but cumbersome at the moment. Suggested to Mike Kingsnorth to create a replacement for Autodesk Image Modeller and provided him with workfiles to test.

Scouting-ahead workflow, pushing the asset in the next step to see what problems turn up.

Tried RizomUV and determined it's superfluous for this use. The roundtripping isn't worth it when you have Blender/ ZenUV/ UVPackmaster stack. Editing the geometry while unwrapping is essential.

Learned Marmoset Toolbag baking workflow, vastly prefer it over Substance Painter.

Stubbornly packed everything on one texture (indie atlasing inertia). I could have used a couple of UDIMs.

Plannin'n'execution

spiral notebook logs

Credit where it's due

Mark Kingsnorth for Perspective Plotter and Curves to Mesh- fantastic Blender addons.

AMC team for feedback and review- Andreea Zamfir, Vicentiu Popescu, Mircea Constantinescu, Georgiana Toea.

Lusse Auto Scooters for inspiration.

Cutting room floor ✂

Character. I wanted to add an eerie crash test dummy, both for scale and for story. I didn't have time left over in the budget to do that.

Multiple skins. I set up the Substance file in such a way that reskins could be easy, but that time's passed.

Environment. I planned to do a park or a track where multiple different Jets were abandoned, along with some crash test dummies. It would have given the scene a story, but that woulda been a whole environment challenge in itself. I was on a deadline here.

Software:

// revised 2025.12.03
// drafted 2025.03.12