#3d modelling practice

Progress post time, first up is the new way the snowball melts, it wasn’t much of a change but it’s more visible than before that it’s melting. Before moving onto making actual characters from the start a friend suggested I make abstract shapes and stuff first which makes sense. 2 Chess pieces I made in about 10-15 minutes each bellow:

© UTJ/UCL

Here's the final 3D Model with its texture besides.

And a final render to top it all off (I gave it a French New Wave kind of lighting for funsies)

Latest assessment submission! For a 3D Environment I made this gorgeous, futuristic house by Jesse Riggle (and added some detail to the reverse angle).

Blockout:

Checking to see if I had gotten a sense of the proportions and the appeal:

Modelling:

Just chipping away at getting all the polygons I need in there.

Texturing:

UV unwrapping and creating a texture that matches the style.

Rendering:

Finally, added some lights, environment fog and atmospheric lighting and voila!

I did and done the cannon and moved on with my life. I'm cannon-free, babyyyyyyy.

So I pivoted to the Mushroom potion!

[I'll add my breakdown of the edge loops when I get home]

Here's my blockout

It's MUCH too complicated according to my lecturer. And hey, okay, it's, like, 8000 tris?

But this is a test of appeal, so it feels like I should go wild with the poly count if I'm testing if I can capture the appeal of the thing, that way I can chip away from that point while still keeping the appeal, instead of making forms and shapes that barely relate to what the object will be later...

Idk. I'm definitely going to try and see if I can do the more minimal approach next time.

Anyway, progress shot as I chipped away at the modelling.

~3600 tris and it's looking good, honestly. I think a few places fall down with the smoothing, but hopefully once I assign a shader that won't be very noticeable.

Also, here's a version with the phial hidden so you can see the liquid on the inside:

Got some lil' bubbles doing their thing, which I'm happy with.

I spent some time working on shaders but not to the kinds of success I was hoping for. It looks alright, and certainly comparable to the source image, but I feel like tying myself to the source made my final result look a little crappy, tbh... (but what mostly makes it a bit crappy is that it's amateur shader work and all of this is fine, lol).

Final Thoughts

I didn't totally capture the appeal of the object, but that's a skill to be developed. I am happy that I captured some of the finer detail so well, however (the string placement, the bead shapes and sizes, the bubbles).

To better capture the appeal I would have made the phial even more squat, stocky and rounded than it is already, then just brought the string and beads in line with those proportions.

Overall the structure is good and I'm happy with the modelling I did and the results I got. It took time to get this done and speed/efficiency will need to be worked on, but this is a good start.

I started work from this illustration, but it has a nebulous sense of scale and size. Next time I start from an illustration with such a frustrated perspective I'll have to draw out the needed faces/edgeloops, but also do some loose measuring to better capture appeal.

Okay. I've submitted this assessment, it's time to move on with my life!

For the first assessment we've to choose from 1 of 8 potential concepts and then flesh it out from the graphic to a fully 3D modeled object. I decided to shake the rust off by practicing making the cannon before diving in. Sounded like a good warmup, y'know?

Anyway, here's the source image of the cannon:

(Props to Natash Gavrilets for the design (I'm guessing), because it's a very cute little piece (tho it probs belongs to Torrens University... idk. Don't take/use this, hey?))

And now the 3D model as I've made it:

I'm quite happy with the result, I think the form is really smooth and the viewer could hardly spot a hard polygon from most practicable player perspectives.

Now, mine definitely doesn't have the full appeal of the original's cartoonishness, as the proportions aren't quite right for the body and definitely not for the cannon's lip. It's close, but not close enough.

My version still lands quite in the territory of realistic and in future I shouldn't be afraid to stretch credulity or wonk the creation to get the desired appeal. Especially here where the form fits firmly inside the real with plenty of give to spare.

The poly count is ~2500, with the ideal count being between 1000-5000, so I feel confident that I've achieved the brief in achieving style on a lower polygon budget. Even using that many polygons I managed to bevel the edges of the wheels to keep them properly firm, had plenty of edge-loops around the cannon to smooth it nicely along its length... Hell, do you under the wooden chassis there's that long, metal piece that rests on the ground? Yeah, that part is bevelled ALL along its length (to great effect). I feel confident that I used my polygon budget judiciously and to great effect.

As a bit of homework I was tasked to recreated a barrel (in broad shape) in Maya. It was a reasonably easy bit of homework, but good fun and I figured I'd break it down a bit here.

Firstly, the source material:

Knowing just enough about 3D modelling I figured out some rough ideas of edge loops from the jump, knowing that otherwise things could get rough.

Starting with a polygon primitive, then, was the way to go. Since the barrel has quite a cute, cartoony affect I figured it should be quite stumpy. I decided on 80 cm diameter, 60 cm height, 24 faces around, 10 edge loops vertically and a loop on the cap ready to go.

Next up I moved some edgeloops to make the distinctly spaced metal bands.

I could have made those separate objects, but this felt pretty efficient in terms of polygons, and also a pretty trivial difference.

Selecting the faces of both bands I scaled them out uniformly, then selected each band's faces and scaled in down vertically again, that way the bands would come out exactly the same.

I then selected the top and bottom caps, extruded them towards each other evenly.

Next up I wanted to develop the overall, rounded nature of the barrel, so I selected the very top and bottom vertices as rings turned on soft-selection and increased the area of effect.

With that selection made, I scaled all the vertices along the X and Z axes, which curved the whole body nicely inward and giving me a nice round form.

Next I selected the middle faces which were out of reach of the previous soft-selection scaling, and just scaled them out to give the barrel a nice, chubby feel, as well as a continuous, consistent profile.

With the body looking right I created new objects to be the bolts that live on the metal bands of the barrel. I used polygon spheres but with a largely turned down face count.

I scaled these spheres down so as to flatten them, then rotated and embedded them in ways that made sense for the source.

Selecting two of the spheres I then duplicated them and put them on the opposite side, largely mirroring their placement (at least well enough at a glance). To complete the form I would need another set of four spheres, so I selected my four, duplicated them, grouped them and rotated them 90 degrees. This fairly trivially allowed me to have a complete set of spheres and in the right positions even on close examination.

Looking over the barrel again I found the shape of the metal bands didn't stand out enough and decided to bevel them to make them stand out more sharply and distinctly.

Finally, the form looked pretty much how I was hoping it would.

And here is the final result:

In contrast with the original asset you can see a few differences.

Firstly, the concept has a lot of splits in the wood that mine don't, but that would largely be addressed using normal maps and textures, more than it would modifying the topology.

More importantly, the source image of the barrel has a much cuter shape. I notice now that the metal bands stick out even further than mine do, the spheres are larger and more bulbous, and the barrel itself is bottom-heavy, whereas mine quite symmetrical.

Finally, my asset came out at a total of 1376 faces. This is actually much higher than I should like and I'll need to work on bringing that down, but that's an alright result for the moment.

If I was optimising for a fixed-rotation camera perspective like Diablo 3 I would be able to cut every underside face, as well as almost the entire back half of the barrel... But I would like to know how I might have lowered the poly count from the start without compromising too hard on feel.

Some thoughts that came out of this:

When performing operations in Maya how can I ensure that those operations are precise? (such as when scaling using the gizmo. I can do that to a grid, but what if I want an exact scaling of 69.69?