Week 3 assignment

Why I’m a bit late

I have been sick now for a week and I am just now starting to pick up the alarming amount of work that builds up in just one week! The group that I was in was not complete, so it was only Simon Strandh and I, working on each other’s crates.

Before                                                                              After

Sci-fi crate

I think that the biggest challenge with cleaning this one up is that I over-used the bevel tool along with using the mirror function, this created a lot of overlaps and funky polygons. In my defense it was the second time I ever modelled, and I had no clue about poly counts and clean phases.

So basically what Simon has done is to merge the two sides of the crate and smoothed out some of the areas where I had used to much bevel. He probably deleted the polygons that were affected by the bevel and then capped the holes. I think that it was the right thing to do, because those areas were redundant and could just as easily have been made with texture alone. He would also have had to address some overlapping surfaces by welding the overlapping vertexes together or removing the ones that were out of place.

Medieval crate

This one is just a disaster when it comes to optimizing and cleaning up the polys, since the group was incomplete there was no one who optimized this one for me. I gave my best try with the skills I have acquired so far, and it got me nowhere! This crate is hopeless for me right now and the only way to get it right is to do it all over from scratch! So I guess that the lesson I learned from working with this crate is the importance of building objects  with correct loops and polygons from the beginning, and to make details like the lock and handles into separate elements instead of extruding them from the base shape.  And never ever place complicated shapes in the crack between the two mirrored sides of an object!

Post apocalypse crate

This crate was my final one, the one that I was supposed to optimize on my own. The thing about this crate though is that was pretty much optimized from the beginning. It was the last crate I made during week two, and by then I had started to realize the issues connected with using too many effects and tools instead of keeping things simple and separate. So I challenged myself to use as few polygons as possible and not get carried away with details that I could make with texture instead. I should correct myself here… I thought that I had optimized my design, however I was dead wrong in thinking that, it was a premature assumption. The model is in fact very flawed in that it is not divided into separate elements, like the doors are for example extruded directly from the locker instead of having them made into separate objects. That in turn makes it really hard to take the model to the next step of uv-mapping it!