BGP – 5
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I want to tell a little bit about the things that I liked the most and at the same time they were also the most time consuming. Im going to start with the fountain. The plaza was large and rather empty. We were thinking should we perhaps make a statue or a fountain. After a short while, everyone agreed on the fountain. Okay, so the progress of creating the mesh for the statue didn’t go as I planned. First, I though in my head “Why would I need a reference photo, I know what a fountain looks like” Then I simply tried to model one without even looking at the photos and the end result was this:
My group member’s comment was “That looks like a giant ash tray” and I agreed. The second try went a little bit better. A good reference photo was found and I simply did that one.
The only thing left was to make the fountain broken in pieces and texture it! This is the end result:
The second big prop for the game was the shopping cart. There was a grocery shop in our game but we created the building entirely ruined and broken. We were thinking of all the ways we could message the player that this place is indeed the grocery store (It’s crucial since the player needs to find a person near the grocery store.) but it was harder than we thought. Our original idea was that the player could see inside the store a little bit and see all the products but that didn’t work out now. Then we came up with two solutions and we decided to use them both. One of them was a store sign with some sale advertising on it, another one was a shopping cart. I want to point out some things that I could have done better, so this advice is for some unfortunate soul who also decides to model a shopping cart or something similar with a ton of cylinders.
Basically, the modeling of the prop is not hard at all. All you do is duplicate cylinders after cylinders and spend a little bit more time on the wheels and the bottom of the cart since they have some tricky spots. The one that is so excruciatingly slow is the UV-mapping. I should have realised to UV map one cylinder in the beginning and then duplicate that. Usually the program understands to stack them on top of each other so they don’t waste any extra space and also the duplicated ones are UV-mapped as the first one. I started the UV-mapping in the end as I usually do, but somehow I ended up having some troubles with it. I only wanted to use one material ID and having so many cylinders and such was somewhat hard to fit into one UV ’cake’. This is why I would have wanted the cylinders to be stacked already on top of each other. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had the same textures since the player can’t see them that close. I have found a way to stack shells later on but it takes time though. The way I do it is to align vertexes one by one but as I said, that is slow.
Screenshot of the ”grocery store”
The final object that I created for the game was the bike. We had a school in the game but it didn’t really send out the message that it was the school. So, what do every school have in their front yards? Bike stands and bikes of course! The reason why I didn’t model the bike earlier was that I knew it would take more time and there was more important things to do. However, in the end we had managed to fill the plaza and the bar street with debris and props but the school yard still looked so very empty. Also, the bikes gave the feeling that there was people who actually went to school and it wasn’t just a decoration.
The awesome part about modeling all kinds of things is the fact that you can model whatever you want. I have always liked the bikes called “Jopo” so I decided to model that one! The more awesome part was the fact that I didn’t have to care about the color of the bike when texturing since our programmer told me to simply export the black mask where the color was supposed to do and he could change the color in Unreal!
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