4th Model created and textured

Finally I have finished making my mode of transport which is a rocket used in the story at the beginning of the game in my unit 72 game design and animation, the model was made of a single cylinder and 3 pipes.

I first started with a polygon cylinder and immediateky scaled it lots in the y-axis to give it height and I then went into edge mode and used the split edge ring tool many times. I then made changes to the geometry like the top of the rocket I scaled the top ring of vertices to make a point at the top of the rocket. I then grabbed another set of vertices and used a combination of the scale tool and the move tool to get the definition how I wanted it.

I then created a pipe and scaled it to how I want it and I then moved it into position at the bottom of the rocket and duplicated it twice more and moved them in position it give the thrusters that shoots it up in the air.

With the model now how I wanted it, I started texturing the model using a series of cylindrical maps and a planar map to texture the end of the thrusters. I took a few textures from CGTextures to help texture my models. I prevented texture stretching by adjusting the UVs and placed the texture in a PSD file and dropped the texture on the model.

Model 3 Textured

The Level Prop I did was a bridge and this was to get from one ledge to another essentially. When creating this model I thought how do I reduce my workflow as there were 7 parts of this model, the 4 posts two cables and 2 ropes and the planks that make the bridge.

I first created a Polygon Cylinder and scaled the shape to how I wanted it an to add depth I added additional split rings on the model and to reduce workflow, I duplicated the post 4 times to get the corners. I then duplicated it once rotated it 90 degrees counter clockwise in the X axis and duplicated 4 times and lined them up parallel to each other. I then created a cube to be a cuboid using the settings in Maya. and I positioned it and took the UV map of it and textured it straight away so that I can duplicate the textured plank loads of times and saves time.
I then UV mapped the cylinders and textured them separately and saved it when I was happy with it.

Model 2 Textured!

I finally textured my model 2 using the textures on CGTextures, first I created a lambert shader and I've given it a name and dropped the texture on the piece I wanted to texture and turned the texture on so I can see the updates done in Photoshop, I exported a UV map into Photoshop using the settings in the Maya hypershade window under edit -> Create PSD node. From there I adjusted the settings, from the bottom of the interface, I imported colour into the attributes section. Before I launched the PSD node, I adjusted the size of the Texture to 512 X 512. When the PSD file opens, the UV map of the model is displayed and using the basic Photoshop tools and scaling them to fit the UV map. I then went on to do the other part as I made the UV map of both parts so that I could do this a lot easier.

This is 2 models out the way 3 and 4 are half done and I can be able to finish this project by the deadline I'm certain of this.

UV Problems

I started to UV map my weapon it's a challenge, but this was because I did an automatic map and this was the wrong map to use for this model as there are many parts of this model that significantly made this hard, then with Dave Chipp's assistance and very helpful advice, I started my UV map again with the recommended maps to map out the parts of the model.

I first did a cylindrical map of the handle and adjusted the UVs to match the faces on the geometry of the handle. The bottom of the handle is flat so I did a planar map on the bottom from the Y axis and the UV map of this was in the right proportion as the geometry so I didn't need to manipulate the UVs.

I applied 2 more cylindrical maps on the head of the mallet and did a planar map on the end of the sledgehammer part as it was flat. When I combined both the the bottom and the handle and tidied the UVs up.

Once I had all the parts I needed I started putting them together into one UV map and making sure the UVs didn't tangle up as this will cause texture stretching which won't look very appealing in a game engine. I seeked assistance from Dave Chipp because I was a little rusty on the different types of UV mapping, not realising the importance of cylindrical and planar maps. I realised that an automatic map is only for single polygon primitives and not for full scale models.

Big problem!

When I finished the model I switched from polygon to sub divisional surfaces, but decided to keep to polygons, I selected my model afterwards and found that I was 2500 triangles over the limit,  whoops! So now, I thought "I need to do something about this". First thing I did was to figure out how to reduce the poly count significantly and I had to get rid of most of my handle and a complete reconstruction of the axe head and Dave Chipp allowed 10% more on each limit which was helpful as my weapon is now 5300+ triangles as opposed to 8000+ earlier.

I did this by selecting faces from various locations, this results in holes in the geometry and I used the select border edge tool and bridged the gaps and it significantly reduced the triangle count.

Start of the axe

I started with a cylinder and I added more edges to finely tune the handle using the intergrated menu by right clicking the scene and selecting vertex mode and with the move tool and scale tool, I was able to define my geometry.

When this was done I started wiith the pick of the axe and I created a cube and placed it on the handle and I went into face mode and extruded multiple times. I then split the faces and sculpted the axe how I wanted it, when I was happy with the geometry I connected the two together by virtually wielding the axe-head to the handle and combined them as one piece of geometry.

I implemented all these techniques because I feel comfortable working with polygon modelling rather than NURBS. I didn't use sub-divisional surfaces although these would have reduced the triangles.

My thoughts

I thought that the techniques worked wonders and reduced the workflow for me when using these tools to model the pick up item. I felt comfortable and pleased with the end result and texture of the model. When I render it, the model looks how I wanted it to as if it was in a game engine.

I managed the risk of eye strain byu taking breaks every hour of modelling and I wasn't on the laptop for extended periods of time. The risk of corruption was high as I was modelling as I have a laptop with a small amount of memory that makes it go memory dump several times so there was a potential risk it would do it while I was modelling. I counteracted this by saving my work regularly to avoid work loss, when it would do this I won't lose any work.