3D Week 6 – Assignment 2 Final

Here we go; the final version of my collect for the second assignment in the 3D1 course. After crunching for a couple of days to make up for the time I lost whilst attending DreamHack Stockholm -14 a couple of weeks back, I managed to finish on time. I had some trouble remembering how to unwrap my model and create the UV-map, but I got some help from teachers and friends to find my way around the program, though that, as well as the problems I had with 3Ds Max crashing time and time again made my last couple of days horribly stressful. I also spent a lot of time trying to pack my UVs as best as I could, but no matter what I did I ended up with what felt like too much empty space. I’m not sure if I would have been able to pack it any better though, but as with all things – practice makes perfect.

I managed to get it right in the end though, and when I got to texturing the collect I could relax more. There were some troubles with the textures as well though, as I hadn’t been able to get any photos of the collect from behind or below, and didn’t know what it looked like from those angles. The lights at the museum where I took the reference photos also made some areas of the collect very dark, so I had to re-paint a big part of the old paintwork on the textures to make it look right.

My Diffuse map

After finishing my diffuse map I realized that some parts of my model, somewhere along the line had lost some of the smoothing groups that I’d created earlier. I’m guessing that I forgot to add them again somewhere in-between all of the crashes with 3Ds Max, and it bothered me a bit, though I didn’t know how or if I could somehow go back and fix it without having to re-do my entire UV-map and texture, so I left it as it was, hoping that it’s still okay.

My Specular map

My Normal map

The diffuse map took the longest to finish, consuming an entire day as I worked to get the paint to look right. I finished the specular map rather quickly after that, mainly trying to make the wood and paint look about as shiny, or un-shiny (I’m not sure if that’s a word, but if it wasn’t then it is now) as I wanted it to. Then I began working on the normal map, which took many hours of work before I was somewhat happy with the result. I still haven’t entirely grasped how I should handle the normal map, and most of the time I feel like guessing, trying and failing rapidly hoping that what I just did will look right. I think I managed to get it to look at least okay, but I feel as if I could have spent weeks trying to just get it to look right.

And this is my final model! Though there are things that I know that I could have worked more on, making some edges softer or adding more paint-details to the diffuse map, spending ages on the normal map and so forth, I’m proud of the outcome. Just a few weeks back I had never touched a 3D program before, and I wouldn’t have believed it if someone told me that this was what I’d be creating in just a few weeks’ time.

And that’s it for now! Have a great week guys!

Cheers!

/MPh