World Building 10 - Burn Zombie Burn Gun

For this project we had to create a low poly Pistol based off the above concept art.

We had strict restrictions set for this project which included:

• 800 Triangle Limit.
• 64x64 Diffuse Texture
• 128x128 Specular Texture
• 256x256 Normal Map

 To begin with I started off by simply modelling the gun over the concept art, trying to keep the shape and cartoony nature of the pistol. I found the most challenging part to be in keeping the shape of the barrel and chamber, as in order to keep their roundness they made use of a lot of triangles.

After I was done with that I UV mapped the pistol, then created a higher poly one so that I could bake a base normal map from.

I then used Ndo to add additional details to the normal map, before baking a diffuse texture afterwards. I then added colour and then took the texture into dDo to add Ambient occasion and some more minor details.

Below is the gun with the high res textures:

And here it is after I compressed the textures down to their low res size:

Overall I enjoyed the project as it let me experiment with the benefits of different texture sizes, and how big the texture really needs to be in order to get the detail. Although it hurt me to compress the textures down, I can see the benefit of it especially for a low poly game with less details.

Edit: Render in Marmoset Toolbag:

World Building 9 - Trash Assignment

This week's assignment was emulating the kind of work that would be given to us in the industry. In this case we had to produce a low poly asset of trash that could be used in a urban environment.

It was really easy modelling the actual trash and boxes, however the difficulty I found was making the most of the 500 Triangle budget we had. At the time I found it difficult just to get near the triangle budget, but I tried to make the most of it by tessellating the planes inside to give more depth to the garbage inside the box.

UV mapping the model was the most tedious part, I used RoadKill to help sped up the process as it managed to automatically separate the maps for the different model elements inside the box. I then proceeded to texture the box using the photos of trash as reference as well as references from google. I also baked an Ambient Occlasion map in 3ds Max which gave the texture some local shadow.

Although the Ambient Occlasion is great, it does unfortunately hide the little details inside the trash box, which otherwise would be visible if it wasn't for the strong shadow. But still it is a cool technique in my opinion, and one I will apply to other works.

Edit: Marmoset Render: