The Heaviest Corner on Earth

A few screenshots from an environment art project I worked on a while ago:

You wouldn’t believe how many “I’m on a boat” references I had to endure while making this

Two quarters ago, when I was in CMPA110, I posted my projects on this blog.  I’ve conveniently skipped showing my projects from ITGM130, Digital Design Aesthetics, because they’re boring and not worth writing about.  This quarter I’m taking ITGM240: Modeling, Materials & Lighting.  This class, almost halfway through my four years, is really the beginning for me.  My long-term career goal is doing environments for games.  It’s what I really enjoy, particularly modeling and (oddly) laying out UVs.  So this class is where I’m pouring all my effort this quarter, which is tough since I have two other classes that require as much work, if not more.  The first project was a WWI Springfield rifle.  I’m not bothering to show it because it’s an exercise from a book that hundreds of people have done, it’s not modeled very well, and it doesn’t have a texture because I didn’t know when it was due (luckily, I’m able to resubmit projects in this class).

The second project for MML was a lot more open-ended.  We were to design and model a complex object.  Since I have laying around a folder of whaling reference images that was begging to be used, I decided to make a whaling ship.

Concept rendering is something I’d really like to improve on, but there it is.  There were a lot of detail sketches of different parts and props, but unfortunately most of them didn’t make it into the final product.  In fact, toward the end I realized I couldn’t finish everything, and the focus shifted a bit.  It ended up being a blocky model of a harpoon gun with some pretty elaborate background scenery.

I had two weeks to work on it, but I also had a lot of work to do for other classes.  And besides that, unwrapping that harpoon gun took about six hours, and there was a lot more than that to be UV’ed.  But that took a lot of time mostly because I was unaware of Move and Sew and hadn’t worked out a solid process for UV layout.  Looking back, the whole thing was a huge learning process.  I came into the project knowing how to use Maya pretty well, but the experience of making this ship filled in so many blank spots about proper workflows, practices for efficient modeling, and other things you can’t learn without experience.

Some of the things I learned through failure while working on this project:

1. Proportion is important, starting from the very earliest concepts.  My drawings had no scale reference, and while modeling most of the ship I just cloned simple boxes around the scene to serve as human-sized reference objects.  But a box is very ambiguous, so I ended up adding heads and arms to them later on and having to rescale things, but I still don’t think my boat would be a properly-proportioned whaling vessel in real life.  I’m paying more careful attention to scale in my next project.
2. Consider the scope of your project very carefully.  I ended up wasting a lot of time modeling and laying out UVs for part of the ship that I didn’t have time to texture or properly detail.  It’s good to aim high, but make sure that 80% of your goal will still be presentable.  Luckily I was able to focus on the harpoon gun and leave the rest of the ship out of the final render, but it didn’t feel good to jettison all that work.
3. Consider your model’s context, even if you have to make one up.  This was just a modeling project, but it would have helped to establish from the beginning a game engine, an art style, and a context under which the object would appear in a game.  A boat that the player walks on is far different from a boat that the player sees in the distance.
4. Within reason, don’t undershoot the polycount.  This one may be debatable, but it’s easier to remove edge loops than to add them.  For me, this went hand-in-hand with the previous point: from the beginning I should have considered that the original hull was far, far too low-poly for such a large prop that the player would walk on.
5. When laying out UVs, minimize seams in large, highly visible areas.  For the hull I made planar projections on the port and starboard sides, and then made separate projections for the bow and stern.  The sides looked great by themselves, but there was no way to avoid a giant, ugly seam between the bow and the sides.  This configuration made it very difficult to paint out this seam.  It probably would have been better to put the seams on the sides where they would have been much easier to paint out.
6. Reference is important, and so is making concepts based on that reference.  The shape of the hull was somewhat stylized, but it was based on photos of similar-sized ships.  The harpoon gun was based on reference (though, going along with point #3 and establishing an art style, I wish I had made it more stylized).  The cabin, bridge, and mast are all completely fantastical and almost entirely made up without reference.  It definitely shows in the noticeable disconnect in the scale, detail, and general aesthetic of those different parts.

I’d like to go back and redo most of this, maybe during the break.  For now, though, I’m working on the third project, an interior scene.  I’ve got 11 more days.

Fallout Shelter

I finished my third Computer Apps project. I started with the cylinder shape posted earlier and was going for game-spec, but I eventually threw that out the window. Since texturing a large, complex cylindrical shape is a fairly difficult and involved process, I covered everything in corrugated steel panels, then made some props to flesh out the particular corner I decided to focus on.

It could look a lot better with much more work, but it was a good learning experience and far beyond what anyone else did (the assignment was just to model an object in Maya, no materials or lighting required). The professor and the rest of the class seemed impressed. In all, it probably took about 15 to 18 hours to finish.