Air Conditioner - Full Tutorial

More than fourteen hours on one air conditioner, carried the whole distance: modelled, unwrapped, textured and rendered, with nothing between the empty scene and the final frame left off camera. It is an intermediate tutorial, and it is structured as a production pipeline rather than as a modelling lesson with a texturing appendix.

The modelling phase alone runs past ten hours in 3ds Max and takes the mid-poly route — the silhouette is chased first with a proxy mesh, and only once that reads correctly is detail added on top. Unwrapping moves to Rizom UV, where the model is laid out across UDIM tiles rather than a single map, which is what keeps texture resolution holding up at close range. Texturing is done in Substance Painter on those tiles. Rendering is Marmoset Toolbag: materials created and the textures imported, then lights set and the cameras framed for the presentation shots.

What you get

• ✓Over ten hours of 3ds Max modelling using a mid-poly, proxy-mesh-first strategy
• ✓UDIM unwrapping in Rizom UV, where the tiles can be built efficiently
• ✓Substance Painter texturing carried out across the UDIM layout
• ✓A full Marmoset Toolbag pass: materials, texture import, lighting and camera framing
• ✓Video only, without narration or subtitles at any point

This is the tutorial to take when you can model but your work stops at the point where it has to be presented. The chain from Rizom UV to Substance Painter to Marmoset is where most self-taught prop artists lose time, and watching it done once end to end on a real asset is worth more than a dozen isolated lessons on each package. Because there is no narration, the software's own interface carries the explanation: every setting changed is visible on screen.

Before you start

Intermediate level — you should already know your way around each package well enough to navigate it and use its primary functions. The software used is 3ds Max, ZBrush, Rizom UV, Substance Painter and Marmoset Toolbag. The download is the video; the model and the source files stay out of it. Produced by Mirage3Dart and Milad Kambari.