I discovered an old Homelite 26 LCS Chainsaw and fell in love with its circular forms, consequently I embarked on this project to improve realistic prop creation. Which resulted in a compelling challenge with emphasis placed upon hard surface modelling, texturing, material creation, light and presentation. The modelling is fairly straight forward and documented in the WIP, utilizing an opensubdiv workflow driven through data channels for consistent rounding and hardness. The chain is a tiling trimsheet replicated across the chains model with the top edges being depressed to achieve a slanted top cutter and animated with a simple UV offset Panner node.

Texturing took up the plurality of time with a plethora of scanned materials, alpha's, and materials being created throughout the process. With the metallic materials being photographed in neutral lighting, cleaned-up and tiled in PhotoShop, then processed in Substance Alchemist/Sampler. While decals were developed through a mixture of Illustrator and Photoshop and applied through Substance Painters projection tools. The rest of the texturing utilizes a copious amount of anchor points for material layer stacking and blending.

With the presentation and lighting utilizing HDR LightMap Studio to produce mostly glancing light passes and rim lights given the high reflectivity and darker values of the materials.