Imagined Worlds Assets
For my Imagined Worlds project I plan to create a 3D environment. It will be a dystopian future with an industrial theme that mixes traditional buildings with industrial elements like pipes, wires and pollution. Before I start planning out my scene, I have decided to create some smaller assets. Even if I do not end up using these assets I feel it would be a good idea to get more used to making a fully textured model from scratch using Substance Painter and Maya.
Megaphone
My first asset was a megaphone. The idea was that the streets would have megaphones dotted around that would read off news and announcements. This was partly inspired by the Dishonored games, which has a similar feature in it's world. The main purpose of this model was to get a feel for the process of making assets for a larger scene - something I had not done before. I also wanted to re-familiarize myself with Substance Painter and UV mapping, as I had not used these for a while.
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I began by bringing in an image plane as reference. This model did not need to be excessively detailed and I only meant to base the model off of the image, rather than copying it. This meant that I did not need views from every angle - one image would do. I started with a cylinder, extruded and beveled two edge loops near the back and scaled up the other end slightly.
I wanted the front of the megaphone to be square as shown in the image. I used soft select to reshape the front into this shape, pulling the vertexes and using symmetry to keep it in line.
Inserting an edge loop did not work here, so I used the multi-cut tool to make a loop inside the faces and extruded them inwards. I then repeated this towards the middle and extruded this back outwards to create the central piece of the speaker.
I then added a simple handle at the back using the extrude and bridge tools.
I then added a simple handle at the back using the extrude and bridge tools.
I was initially going to leave it there, but I was not happy with the bulky look of the model and went back to make some changes. I scaled the edges to make the outer edge slimmer. I also scaled the faces on the edge loops to make more of a curved shape. After this change I felt that the central 'stick' in the speaker should be scaled up too. I am glad I made this change as I feel it makes it more obvious what the model is supposed to be and captures the shape of a megaphone better.
Moving onto UVs, I simply used the Automatic UV option to create my UV maps. This felt too easy almost, and I will have to wait and see if any issues arise from it when I move to Substance Painter. I tried out some of the other options like planar and cylindrical but they did not create as good of a result as automatic. The maps look clear enough to me and the checkerboards are not distorted.
Lamp Post
Later on into the project I also made a lamp post model. I started with a cylinder and used extrude and scaling to create the shape. I then used the smooth tool to add polygons to the model to make it more rounded.
The shape became more complicated as I worked upwards. Extrude continued to work. Elements like the prongs on the side I have simply extruded out from the main body. I created a new object for the top part so I could work from a cube.
This model was very quick to make. I felt a lot more confident with modeling at this point. I find that using the extrude tool is much more effective than trying to join different objects together.
