CLECO Nutrunner | Hard Surface & PBR Pipeline | CAD to Real-Time

Not every asset starts from scratch — and knowing when to work smarter is part of the craft.
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The CLECO Nutrunner was built using a hybrid sourcing pipeline. The tool body began as an official STEP file sourced directly from CLECO's website, giving me engineering-accurate geometry as a foundation. For the M18 battery — no file available — I turned to Meshy AI using a photographic reference to generate a high-resolution interpretation of the asset, then made it production-ready through the rest of the pipeline.
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Both the STEP data and the Meshy-generated FBX were brought into PiXYZ Studio for mesh optimization and UV generation — cleaning up the dense CAD and AI-sourced geometry while preserving surface fidelity before any artistic work began.
In 3ds Max 2024, the meshes were organized into a proper hierarchy built for efficient texturing handoff, with normals, smoothing groups, and topology refined before moving downstream.
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Texturing in Substance Painter 8.1.0 followed the same disciplined workflow used for previous assets in this library — a custom ID map for organized material separation, a mesh bake, then a layered folder structure that builds each zone from base material through secondary detail, surface coat, and aging effects. Physically accurate beauty rendered in Iray, with tone mapping calibrated for material contrast across the orange housing, black rubber grip zones, and metal hardware.
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This one was less about modeling from nothing and more about making smart pipeline decisions — knowing which tools to use, when to use them, and how to get them all talking to each other cleanly.