At this point in the project, concept art was finalised and the characters and scripts were still being worked on. From this point onward it was my job to create a bunch of 3D assets which would be implemented into the game. Here I will go through a few development processes for some of the more substantial assets, but images of them all will be listed here despite. At the end of this blog I'll also be doing a little self-evaluation, given this part of the project is where most of my time and effort have been applied.
Cupcake - The cupcake was a very interesting thing for me to do because it lead me to use new tools I've yet to ever pick up and use, these tools being Soft Selection and Lattice Deformation.
The first step to making this cupcake was to make a simple cake cup to hold it in, and then within that get the top part of a sphere, flatten it and soft select it's edges and vertices to make it look soft as if it were a real baked sponge.
The next part was to make then cream which was a little lengthy but pretty simple as it mainly just involved using extrusions to get something relating to soft cream, although I needed to do something else before it looked as it needed to. This is because right now it doesn't really look like it came out of a can but we can fix that with Lattice deformers. By attaching a Lattice deformer to the cream and giving it a suitable amount of rows I was able to twist each row of Lattice point to give it a curved spiral effect, as if it was just squeezed out of a can. Here you can see a before and after demonstration of the Lattice doing its job.
Next part of the process was to smooth the cream because right now it looks very blocky and doesn't look too nice. But once that was done it looked a whole lot better, all that was left to be done was add a few sprinkles for decor and colour group everything for texturing.
Utah Teapot - This teapot was a 3 part process using NURBS wires to create each individual piece before finally assembling them. For this project I used a reference image to make my job somewhat easier, as I found it difficult to try and imagine a teapot correctly.
The middle part of the teapot consisted of drawing a NURBS wire over the left half of the shape's outline, and then using the Revolve tool to have it circle around and create a mesh once converted from NURBS to Polygons.
Both the handle and spout of the teapot were done a little differently because they unlike the center part aren't symmetrical and won't work with this process. So what I instead did was use the NURBS Extrude tool to extrude a NURBS circle along the path of a NURBS wire, and modify the finished shape to my liking to polish it off. One it was done the group commented on strange shape of the handle, despite it being replicated from the image so I instead made it a bit more round. Here is the spout and both handles.
Once this was done I just had to combine them and it was good to go.
Sandwich - This model isn't as cool as the above two but it taught me an important lesson in the form of the message 'things don't need to be excruciatingly high-poly to give it the look you're desiring.' a lesson I'm definitely applying to new models in the future. To start off I got an image of a slice of bread and formed a basic cube into the shape of it.
Once done I also applied an edge loop onto it to get the crust of the bread and duplicated it to get two slices, alongside colour grouping the two.
Once this was done I used simple polygonal objects to make the sort of things you'd get in a sandwich such as cheese, bacon and tomatoes. Despite being low-poly, once all grouped together it still looks quite good and resembles nicely what it's supposed to.
Here are the rest of my assets not shown here.
Self Evaluation - Although I'm happy with I produced I need to put myself on the chopping block whilst I assess a few things. Firstly, I need to be more consistent with my style because sometimes I opt for more cartoonish models like in the telephone whilst my coffee machine is very resemblant of what it's supposed to look like in the real world, this is an inconsistency I feel like I can manage and overcome with time and practise. I also need to realise that not everything needs to look perfect and sometimes it just flat out shouldn't, this is because it'll be a bad habit in industry when I'm capped to how many polys I can use and would also just make things look a little more orderly when group into a game if I can fix the way I work.
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