I am glad to say that 3D Modeling on my scene is finally complete. There are still a few things left to be done, such as certain UVs or textures that haven't been applied, but the modeling for the scene is fully finished. I'm hoping to have everything needed finished by the time we have to wrap up our games, I really do hope I'll be able to finish everything expected of me as our team's 3D Modeler.
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Our first scene is almost completely done. All that's left to do at this point is to Unwrap some models I have at home, merge both scenes together, and drop it into Unity. That being said, there are some things I want to do for the scene that I can do once I have fully finished both scenes, like tiny little touches to help improve the scenes. I'm also hoping to do an Asset Reflection for my box, because it definitely had a lot of interesting things I would like to discuss.
I have been able to finish the UV for most of the objects currently in my scene. I have also been able to finish most of the objects in my scene. That being said, there are still a few complications. I have two separate files for my scene, one on the school computer, and one at home, because for some reason, exporting the scene to Google Drive messes up the unwrap, so I can't do it until every UV I've started is fully done. That being said, I should have my UVs done in a while, so I will be able to merge both scenes, and complete it soon.
For the most part this week, I was able to create a bit of a Butterfly to help improve my modeling skills while I search for a good reference for the scene I'm working on. I'm happy with the butterfly wing for the most part, the body less so. While I'm happy with the topology and edge flow of the wings, I realized a bit too late the top and the bottom halves are supposed to be separated, although I suppose it doesn't matter so much. I'll probably just mirror the wings, and drop the body I've been modeling in favor of creating a body closer to the image on the right out of splines. Then I'll throw it in a frame, and place it somewhere in the scene.
For the most part, I've been unwrapping a bunch of models from my scene to be textured. I feel I've been slowly getting better at unwrapping models, although I could still be doing it a lot more efficiently, so I've been watching a lot of tutorials to help with that. I've also been preparing for the 3DS Max Certification test using the course I've been provided to help study for it, so I've been fairly busy at the moment. I'm fairly sure the first scene can be done by Friday, and the next few scenes will be done much sooner than the first, so I feel pretty confident about the trajectory I'm headed on.
I've gotten a fair amount of things done for the first scene of the game so far, but there's still a long way to go before it'll be done. While the garage is almost done, there's still a bit of it left to do. That, and the broken piece of hull you jump through. That'll be the hard part of this scene. After that, it might not be smooth sailing, but it'll get easier from there.
This week, I got started on getting the first scene of our game ready. I decided to start by modeling a few of the smaller things in this scene, like these objects you see, and work up to the bigger things. I didn't spend too much time on these, as you will be looking at them from fairly far away. That being said, I should definitely go back to improve the cylinder thing, because- Look at that thing. Even far away, people will be able to tell I didn't put much work into it. I didn't get as much done as I was hoping to, but I'm sure this upcoming week will be a good week.
Over the span of this, I continued to work on a background prototype to get down how to make a background for a game before starting the whiteboxing. It may seem easy to assemble all your assets in a scene to create a background, and it is, but you have to know a few tricks before you can really get it down, which this prototype helped me understand. A primary challenge when assembling a background is perspective. It's always something you have to keep in my mind when creating a scene. I employed a few fairly basic tricks, like scaling objects to make them seem further away and add depth to the scene. Another little trick I did was that on the stairs and top platform, where it starts to jut out, I pushed those segments down so it would look more naturalistic in the scene. Before, you weren't able to see the top of the platform, so doing this helps make the scene feel better. On top of a lot of perspective stuff, I tried adding lighting to the scene to make it more atmospheric. While it's a good start, I can definitely do more. to make it look better, like clearing out all those shadows in the back. Overall, I'd say I've done a good amount of stuff this week, although I do wish I was able to get more done.
I've decided to start a new blog series I call Asset Reflection, so that I can look back on the process of making a model, and try to understand what I did right, and what I did wrong, and hopefully try to show people some new techniques for 3D Modeling. I was thinking of starting off this blog series with my Toy Skateboard model, but I don't feel that would be the most interesting model to discuss. It would just be two sentences of me describing how I extruded a plane and used a couple different modifiers to build the body of the skateboard, and two paragraphs of me desperately explaining why it took me five days to create the metal plates you can see under the skateboard you probably didn't notice in my 'Man Doing Skateboard' image. Instead, I decided to do an asset reflection on my lamp which, while I don't think looks better than my skateboard, is a bit more interesting once you look under the hood. Let's start with the base of the lamp. It was fairly basic making it, I just did the extruding a cylinder trick we learned while making the fire hydrants at the start of the year, and welded all the vertices once I reached the top. One thing I do wish I did was to use support loops in conjunction with the CreaseSet modifier. I made this model when I had just learned about CreaseSet, and completely stopped using support loops in favor of the modifier, but I hadn't stopped to think about why support loops are used in the first place. They're called support loops because they help support the model, and define edge flow. I will try to keep that in mind for future models. Now let's move on to the most interesting part of this model, which you might not have thought would be with just a quick glance. This knob. Let's start with the obvious problem, the distortion towards the bottom of the image. There was a problem while attaching the knob to the lamp. It might have been because the knob wasn't level with lamp, it might have been because two edges were too close, it's definitely a case of bad topology, so I'll be sure to watch out and take notice the next time something like this happens. Now we move on to the interesting stuff. This knob. Let's start with the obvious problem, the distortion towards the bottom of the image. There was a problem while attaching the knob to the lamp. It might have been because the knob wasn't level with lamp, it might have been because two edges were too close, it's definitely a case of bad topology, so I'll be sure to watch out and take notice the next time something like this happens. Now we move on to the interesting stuff. I thought that creating this model would be the perfect time to start practicing working on my topology. I made two cylinders. One that formed the base of the knob, and one that formed the... squiggly part at the top. I described it as a sort of starr-ish shape in my presentation because I didn't know how to describe and I still don't so I'll just call it the top half. The only thing you need to know about it is that I created it with twice as many sides as I did the first cylinder.
To start, I lined up the two cylinders, and for the top one, I took every other edge going down the side of the cylinder, and scaled them down to get the desired squiggly effect. The next thing to do was to figure out how to mesh the two meshes together. I found a handy dandy guide on loop reduction which helped me learn how to take two faces, and convert them to one without messing up the topology, which I then applied to the knob. I'm quite proud for being able to do this, and will try to note what other useful applications I can use this for. The entire website helped me understand topology, and how to re-topologize far better than I had before. Which brings us to the final two elements of the model. The arm (spine), and the shade (cone). My tragic use of the default lighting aside, the arm and the spine especially are the two parts of this model that I have the least amount of good things to say about. The shade was the same thing as the base of the lamp. Extrude the cylinder, although I did throw a shell modifier on top of this one to give it a bit more... depth? Just a part of the model that I don't really have much to say about. But when we look at the arm, the we can see where my lack of support loops came to bite me in the end. Or maybe not. I don't know if not using support loops is what caused this. All I do know is that slapping a CreaseSet modifier on to the arm was not enough. I was hoping for a more defined, box like shape instead of the curvy, smooth mess here. Maybe it's passable. You don't really notice a detail like this when playing the parkour game I designed it for. So maybe it's passable? But then you look at the back. I don't know about you, but I consider this a complete failure on my end. I hadn't noticed the backside until I was much further into the creation of this lamp, and the only reason I didn't do it over was because of the perspective of my parkour game. You're always on the same level as the lamp, looking up at it. If my game were from a normal perspective, I probably would have thrown out the model and started it over with all I had learned. It would probably only take about an hour at most, but I am glad I don't have to. Overall, I am very conflicted with how I feel about this model. It is a product of my advancements in 3D Modeling, but it also has one of biggest missteps so far with game development. That's everything I have to say about my model, but I still have one more thing to say. If you want to advance your 3D Modeling skills, I would suggest watching speed modeling videos, slow them down, and try to process what it is that the modelers are doing. It's how I learned many of the techniques I use to this day. Like this violin modeling video. It was the first speed modeling video I ever watched, and analyzing it taught me so many new techniques to use. There are also many really great channels to consult if you ever need help with anything. Such as Arrimus 3D. His back catalogue is absolutely massive, and he has videos on just about every topic under the sun. Not much else to say. Peace out. |
AuthorHello, my name is Simon Sanchez. I will be writing things about my work and other things in this blog. Archives
May 2022
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