3D Asset – Creation
With an idea of the hero asset I wanted to make in mind, I started work on creating the basic outline of a chest. To do this I took a Box, stretched it into a rectangular shape then proceeded to hold down the shift key while moving it to duplicate the item above it which allowed me to stack the two boxes together. Then with the use of the Bevel tool, I made the top box curved at the top to create the lid of the chest.
I then added two image planes to allow me to reference different objects I wanted to create, one of them being a bone, which I will use for surrounding the chest and the other being a spine and a ribcage which will be on the top of the chest.
For the bone, I recognised that its shape was basically 3 differently shaped spheres with a cylinder with a slight taper attaching them all together After making one bone I was happy with, I duplicated it and altered them in size and thickness and bundled them close to each other to put around the outside of the base of the chest.
When approaching the spine, I realised I could recreate it by using lots of small cylinders with a thicker base linked together. I formed a straight line out of these initially to get the shapes I wanted correct before bending it around the top of the chest.
Once I was happy with the shapes and the bend around the chest, I used NURBS curves to create a curve around where I wanted the ribs to go then used the sweep mesh tool to create a polygon around that curve. From there I altered the edges and widened some to give a more boney effect on them and I altered its curves to hug the chest more. I also added a Torus and a sphere on the front to make the eyeball and bone surrounding it.
When I opened the UV map I was clueless about what to do at first, but then I tried to arrange all the different pieces apart and found that only the UV nets inside the 1×1 square were able to be worked within substance painter 3D, so I had to find a workaround I realised that a lot of them formed the bones surrounding the chest so I decided to stack all of those together which took a while until I notice there was a “stack and Orient” tool built into the UV editor the entire time which did the job much faster and much better than I could do on my own.
Once all the modelling and UV maps were sorted, I moved over to substance painter 3D where I added the textures to my model and some normal maps to make the bones more realistic and bumpier. I make the eye texture on my own in photoshop as I couldn’t find one online that I liked for my project. I quickly realised that I made a mistake with the UV map when I tried putting the eye texture on the sphere and it was stretched with the front of the sphere pointed downwards so I had to go and fix that which was simple as all I needed to do was rotate the sphere in Maya.
