Advanced Assignment 3D-I Week 4 & 5

No blogpost last week, and no excuse for it other than me being lazy.. So I thought I’d sum up both this week and the last in one post.

Once pre-production was done, I immediately started with the model. Now, being restless, I actually started modeling a bit before going through the pre-production, mapping out the general shapes of the model to make sure that I got the proportions right at the beginning. Everything done here is strictly based on what was visible on the concept.

Everything done prior to pre-production

One of the major parts of the assignments, is the individual interpretation of the concept, especially the parts that aren’t shown; the back and right side in this case. As mentioned in my last blogpost about the pre-production, I looked at antique De Dion Bouton cars, as well as steam engines and locomotives.

Unfortunately, there isn’t very much going on on the back of these, so I had to come up with something else to spice up the rear of the model. Now, it IS a steam powered vehicle, functioning very much like a locomotive, so I figured that there had to be a furnace somewhere to add coal to the engine. Looking at the concept, you can see that there is a large volume underneath the vehicle, so I felt that this is the place where the engine had to be, providing steam to the pressure chambers connected to the rods on the sides. Adding coal underneath the vehicle however, would be very straining and difficult, so instead I added a hatch on the back, where the driver could add coal, and then drop it into the engine by pulling a handle (5).

It seemed to me, form the captions on the concept, that it was also a sort of terrain vehicle. For this reason, I chose to add a spare wheel on the back, in case any of the others broke (6).

At this point I felt I was finished enough for the first iteration, and send it to the teacher to get feedback (7). The main critiques were the symmetry of the sides, 90-degree angles and that the main body was a bit flat. I was encouraged to add chamfer (bevel in Maya) to the edges to make the model more interesting from all angles as well as include the “permagrip” cylinders to the wheels and make sure that I used up all of my poly budget (I was at this point at about 12500 polygons out of 15000). These were amazing tips and made all the difference in terms of quality (8).

UV-mapping

Next up, we have the part of 3d that most people dread; UV-mapping. Now I don’t especially mind it anymore, since it’s become a part of my general workflow, even if it is an “unnecessary” step halting the creative process a bit. Not too much to say about this process except that it was a bit different from what I’m used to due to the amount of components in this model; slightly more tedious than normally (8). Basically I just tried to fit everything as closely as possible, taking into consideration the margin necessary for poly painting in mudbox, an approach I like to combine with traditional 2d texturing in Photoshop.

Texturing (Poly painting + Photoshop)

Time for texturing! What I like to start with here is to bring the model into Mudbox and map out the base colors for everything. Generally I like to do as much as possible in Mudbox, as I can then clearly see exactly what it will look like instantly. However, Photoshop can be easier to use when changes need to be made or pixel perfection is needed; for example if I need to made a perfect circle or add some text to something. So I like to jump back and forth between these two software depending on what I’m doing. Mudbox for shading and detailing and as much else as I can, but sometimes it just doesn’t cut it and I need to bring it into a dedicated image editor. Unfortunately I don’t have progressive images of this, but here is where I am currently:

From here I’ll finish the diffuse, followed by making a normal map and specular map.