OTM Aaron Cunliffe Week 6

With the first week of Easter break here I plan to carry on with work and have a few more assets completed by the end of the week.

This week so far has been slow paced by comparison to term time but i hope to pick up the pace by week 2 and hopefully have all of my assets completed and in the level by term 3.

I also have a back catalog of other tasks i have to complete by the end of term 3 and plan to use the Easter break to complete all of the others tasks aside from the off the map project.

Some of these tasks include self directed study for life drawing and ironically my weekly blog posts.

I began the week by modelling a sofa for our level which proved more time consuming than i had initially anticipated.  

I think it was the style of sofa that contributed to the longer modelling time and the twisting, curved forms were difficult to translate into simple geometry outside of sculpting them; which is an approach i will consider next time. I took the same approach with this prop as i did with my dining chair and added rococo detail in zbrush that i could use in my normal map.

I textured the sofa using a simple varnished wood texture that i have been using for the majority of my wooden models; I did create a wood texture of my own but it didn't fit with the overall style and had features that looked strange when tiling.

To fit a consistent style i used the same embroided fabric texture for my sofa that i used for my chair and the finished product was leagues ahead of what I started out with; at the start of creating this asset I wasn't confident with the style and considered scrapping it for something simpler but i'm glad i stuck with the more risky option and succeeded with it.

Low poly sofa 

High poly sofa

Assets in Substance painter with materials applied

sofa

my next asset this week was a simple magicians cane, a welcome change to the usual large wooden assets i have been creating so far.

i wanted to keep this asset simple and only really create detail for the head of the cane.

I considered things like skulls and gems but in the end went for a simple silver round shape with various rococo details to add something to a simple object.

I used the same technique as previous assets and used custom detail brushes in zbrush which really shortens the time needed to create assets but still allows interesting details and variation.

cane

cane close up

once the cane was complete I went back to creating larger assets and was tasked with creating some magicians props.

I chose to create a magicians water tank, similar to the type that Houdini used in his shows.

I wanted this prop to be more practical and utilitarian than stylish like my other props as all it had to was hold water.

I plan to use luxurious materials such as gold and varnished wood or at least cheap facades of those types of materials.

Overall this prop has been quite simple to make, considering it is a box although some of the smaller details have been more troublesome to create or often quite fiddly.

Overall this prop has been quite straight forward with all of the boxy straight shapes and I am currently up to the texturing stage which i will begin next week.

I do have a few concerns with my model of my water tank and may go back and fix those for peace of mind before i commit to the texturing stage.

Things like missing details and chamfers on my high poly model which could hinder my texturing stage in a few ways are things on my list of changing before i texture and having already baked my normals i will have to go back and do them again once corrections have been made; but thing like this can be expected.

Water Tank high poly in 3DS Max

Water tank with materials applied