3D Graphics week 2

This weeks assignment was to create crates following 3 different themes. We were allowed to choose from: Medieval, Sci-Fi, Urban contemporary, Post apocalyptic or Cartoony.

The initial three I picked were:

1. Medieval 

This is how my first crate turned out! The idea I had when I decided to make a medieval crate was to make a crate entirely out of ”wood”, this is the reason for the plank-like structure on each of the 6 sides of the crate. When looking at crates in games with medieval themes, I looked at fable & skyrim.

Looking at the ones from fable, I got the horizontal planks on each of the sides, this looked a tad bit boring to me and border on being too perfect. Looking at crates from Skyrim, I got the idea of putting the diagonal planks across the crate on each side (I know the skyrim one does not have them on each side, but I wasn’t trying to make it identical either!). The reason why these games fitted as examples for me was because I have spent far too much time in both of these worlds and the medieval themes are obvious in both of them.
2. Post apocalyptic

When creating the post apocalyptic crate, the idea I had was that I needed to create something that looks half broken, as if it had been put together from scrap metals and put together in a rush. The thought was that ”People in a post apocalyptic world won’t have time to bother with creating a perfectly symmetrical crate.” or something along those lines.
When creating this one I only used 1 game as inspiration, and that game was Fallout.

From this crate I took a lot of inspiration, with the slightly crooked metal bars on the top along with the slightly different lengths of the boards on the crate. Fallout is set in a post apocalyptic world and is probably one of the most iconic game series with that theme. Everything is dirty and dark, objects around the world are put together using the remnants of the old world resulting in things not being perfectly symmetrical, people in this world make due with what they have left and try to make something that fills a function rather than focusing on making it look perfect.
3. Sci-fi (Urban)

Now for the one that became a problem for me (as you can see). When I had chosen Sci-fi to work with, I was looking around the room at what others were doing, most of what I saw were sci-fi crates with a ”Future of mankind” type of tone to them, so I wanted to make something different. I wanted to create something alien, and figured I would use Halo’s covenant as inspiration.

The left one is what I meant when I said ”Future of mankind”, the typical sci-fi style. I wanted something that looked more like the one on the right. At first I had trouble doing this because of a lack of ideas as to how I wanted it to look, so I started playing around with the software and tried to create different shapes. At first I couldn’t get the shapes to curve like I wanted them to, after that I had troubles with creating the smaller details (all this because of a current lack of experience with the software). After struggling to create something that looked even remotely sci-fi or even the least bit like a crate, I had an idea. But as it turns out it was one of those ideas that felt right at first but just turned out terrible in the end. That’s the one I created with sci-fi in mind. In the end it wound up looking more like a ancient Greek temple on a pedestal with checkers on top (the checkers were supposed to be a panel to control opening and closing the crate).

However, due to me being thoroughly unsatisfied with the sci-fi creation. I decided to make a new one with a more urban tone. The game that I took inspiration from is Half-Life. I had a little bid of a hard time finding a good picture of the crate that I used as inspiration but eventually I found this one.

The one I’m referring to is naturally the one with the green cover on it. These crates are more urban-like crates but in a sci-fi environment. Now these are the only crates that exist in my mind. If someone mentions crates in games, these are the ones I immediately think of. This is also one of the reasons that makes it a good example to use, it’s a game that most of us have heard about, and a lot of people have played.
I’m thinking about shortening the green cover on top of my crate seeing how it ended up covering nearly 50% of what I did, but the upper half is practically the same as the bottom half of it.

One thing that all three of the wooden crates have in common is that I made the plank sections uneven, I did this to make the separate planks of the crates more obvious, this might have been something that would have been better to do with textures on the urban & medieval one.