Key Assets

The Fireplace

While my concept sketches looked charming and on theme in 2D, having to translate the style into 3D may cause problems. As the fireplace is one of my key assets, along with taxidermy animal ornaments, I wanted to begin with blocking out the model roughly. I really liked how this version was looking, though its basic, although in order to fit with our theme of wonkiness it may need some more detail and adjustments: like tilting the fireplace slightly, or making it noticeably off center with the stair base. I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted the ‘teeth’ of the fireplace to be bricks or swords yet, but I think the bricks are very ‘Luigi’s mansion’ like, which is our main inspiration. However, many of our other concepts have much more sharp edges, so I will block out a sword design as well as a test.

Out of all my revised fireplaces, this was my favourite as it’s wide, oval shaped firebox looks more like an open mouth than the other designs. If I choose to make this one the final model, I may do some more intricate designs, like maybe some carvings using the boolean menu, and a rim around the firebox. I may also use the sculpt tool how I used it last year on my well, to add more interest to the bricks and stairs. While this is a key asset, I don’t want to go too detailed as I will probably use smart textures and materials later on to make any cuts or chips, or perhaps use blender to sculpt cracks and use a texture projection.

Here, I modified some of the parts to be just a bit more tilted and I think it really adds to it’s overall look! If I choose to develop this one, I will smooth the edges slightly with bevels and bridge/connect any parts that needs it, as so far everything is separate. I will also straighten up where the firebox and hearth/stairs meet, and begin making a fireguard and possibly some fire tools, or even just the fire tool holder.

After talking with my team, I decided that when I go to remake the fireplace I will get rid of one or two of the stairs, while it looked interesting in 2D it kind of overtakes the fireplace itself. I think I still like the steps but I will shorten them, maybe add a lip around the steps and use the same techniques I used in year 1 with the well model’s bricks to give the steps a more wonky, natural and damaged appearance. I also want to bevel the edges of everything more, I still want the edges sharp but with more depth. Also, I will add more variation to the brick sizes and add more of them, or use the tutorial to instead project the depth of bricks on the model. I also had a fireguard design that I may add, as well as a simple vase maybe.

During one of our group calls we came up with the backstory of the house; that it belonged to a crazed taxidermist, hence why the theme of the rooms is anatomy! I wanted the fireplace to look like an open mouth when lit, and instead of modelling medieval swords I wanted to instead make a taxidermist tool, like a saw.

New Fireplace

As the first fireplace I made in class was just a blockout, with no bevels or thought to the topology, I went ahead and remade the fireplace in a much more polished way.

Firstly, I had to get rid of the 3rd tier on the base, it looked way too high in the blockout but I still wanted that flare. I stuck with the brick-like teeth, only I had them inside the firebox this time. I liked the originals look for the brick teeth but I think this translates a little better. I also added bevelled edges, a more detailed base, and more depth in the firebox. I liked how wonky the first fireplace is, this is much more subtle especially with the mantle, but I didn’t want it to look as messy.

Then, of course, I added some extra details like bricks imbedded into the fireplace and chimney, even a couple on the base. A fireguard, almost in the shape of pointy bottom teeth, also for a little more detail. The mantle was missing something too, so I made some very simple nails just to add a little more contrast when it would be textured.

As everything in this model is very simple, blocky and pointed the UVs weren’t as hard as I usually find them! Its probably not as good as I could have made them, but I only focussed on the parts that would be seen.

Taxidermy Saw

For a little extra detail and to help with the theme, I wanted to make a little taxidermy saw. I referenced this image of some tools and modelled quite a simple mesh that I just duplicated and flipped for the other half.

After having my one to one with Daryl, he suggested that I remove some of the edges that don’t effect the shape, to quickly lower the polygons, I spent some time removing edges and vertices and thankfully the polycount went doesn’t significantly and the model looks totally unchanged. It was overwhelming at first looking at the saw because of the polygons, I didn’t know if I would have to retopologize it later on, but I believe it is fine as it is now!

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As usual, the UVs gave me trouble. UV mapping has always been one of my weakest points because I get overwhelmed easily and never know where to start; I tried my best here to have everything as undistorted as possible, and relatively clean looking. I didn’t want to fiddle too much with the UVs because I always end up complicating things too much, and ruining it! I think these look fine though, and there’s nothing too visibly wrong. I also tried having two different UV sets for the first time, although I don’t fully understand how they work I wanted the resolution to be good, so hopefully these are okay when I go to texture them.

I believe the blade UVs look fine, but I went back and sewed parts of the handles together just to keep the set organised. I also gave the blade and handles different lambert materials so as to keep them separate in the other programs.

Secondary Assets

Plates

Modelling plates is very easy, I actually started these in Blender however but quickly realised once bringing them into Maya the polycount was way too high for something so simple! So I restarted in Maya, with the same steps of just extruding a cylinder, and made a plate, platter, bowl and little side plate.

As seen in the UVs, they were very simple but the polycount for these plates is very high, I went back and removed a lot of the unneeded edges and vertices to the main plate, then simply copy/pasted the plate and modified it to be either a smaller plate, bowl or platter.

There was a small issue with the mesh itself, where the base had way too many vertices so I deleted everything and multicut it so as to simplify it. However, it now had a strange dimple effect, I was able to fix this for the bowl and platter, but the small plate and large plate still had a strange effect that can sometimes be seen when textured.

The UVs were pretty simple, of course the sides have a lot of distortion seen here but as this won’t have any patterns or noticeable textures, I left it as it was. There was more distortion in the platter, on the main base where the pattern would go, but it wasn’t too visibly distorted so I also left that as it was.

Rug

I started off with a totally flat plane, edited to form the shape of a forked tongue. My plan was to UV and texture this, then bring it back into Maya and attempt to use nCloth on it to add the winkles to make it look realistic. I tried this on the untextured mesh and unfortunately couldn’t get the look I was wanting as easily as I thought it would be (I’m sure if I spent more time on it, I could get a good looking rug with wrinkles) so I instead decided to add more polygons and just sculpt the wrinkles onto the UVed mesh, which worked! The final rug has slight depth to it, but I wanted to keep it quite flat.

Chairs

I didn’t have a plan for a chair, it was something I hadn’t sketched so I looked to my group’s concept art for help. As our theme was anatomy, I wanted the chair’s back to look like a spine and I wanted to try have the arms look like a ribcage! I began with the base, just something simple like the ones I saw on sketchfab, and added a simple cushion shape on top (I tried to add ‘dimples’ to the cushion also, I think this worked out well!).

I was inspired my the table model one of my group members made, where the legs of the table ended in ‘paws’, I loved this idea and wanted to also try add this to my model but I only got as far as redoing the legs before I sent it over to my group for help. I also wasn’t able to make the arms correctly, I tried using curves and extruding onto it, but it never worked. I also tried manually shaping a cylinder to form something that looked like a ribcage but still it never looked quite right.

My group members Alisa and Matthew were able to help finish the chair and make a stool version, which I’m so grateful for! Alisa finished the model itself, it was interesting to see how she went about designing the armrests and back of quite a simple design, her final version looked so good! It made me realise how different the techniques could be (though her way of doing the ribs and arms looked much better than what I was planning on doing which was unnecessarily complicated).

Broom

Again, I firstly blocked out the shapes I wanted to try for the broom sticks, with altered versions, just to see what worked. While my favourite design in 2D was the jagged broom stick, making it work in 3D was more difficult, and instead I actually prefer the foraged stick look. I may just paint on some of the wood grain bumps rather than modelling them like I did here, but for larger broken off branches I liked the effect I made with just extruding the faces.

Making the bristles were a bit harder, I wasn’t sure if making individual twigs or attempting to spike up the cylinder would be easier but I liked the bushiness of the cylinder so I attempted this way; editing the edges of the cylinder until it was as wide and thin as I wanted in certain areas, then extruding the outer vertices to they make sharp spikes. I played around with this, made some spikes longer than others, made some point up and others down, but I didn’t achieve the look I wanted. The bottom looks fine in this style, but I didn’t like the top though I was determined to make the bristly top to work. I found a useful video on how to make straps using the shrink wrap deformer and duplicated faces, and this was a great method for making the brush’s ties.

I took all the things I learned and liked from the previous shafts and made the final broomstick, with lower polys than the others (by smoothing and deleting the unnecessary edges and vertices as Daryl showed me) and a more interesting shape. I liked the fun shapes of the second sticks, but it just didn’t fit our general art design. The first sticks were what I referenced most, but with harder edges and more difference in the thickness throughout the stick, as I had done in the 3rd design.

I was inspired by a modelling timelapse of the broom from Mary and the Witch’s Flower, so once I have the rest of the broom modelled in Maya, I wanted to take it to Blender so I could add some sculpted dimension, dents and veins in the stick and some curves along the broom.

Moving onto the bristles, I tried to redo the bristles I made when I blocked out the designs, made by just extruding the vertices at the top and bottom, but I quickly realised this wasn’t going to look good. When smoothed, of course all the sharp ends rounded out to look strange and no amount of fiddling with loop cuts and multiple attempts of having layered bristles worked. Nothing really fit the style. So I started to look at other’s witch brooms, on SketchFab and videos on YouTube, to see how they were making the bristles; some sculpted out a few twig looking shapes, copy/pasted them around a pointed cylinder and these looked nice. Others were making simple shapes, like how I had done, and sculped the bristle shapes into the base which I also liked the look of. There where a lot of low poly brooms which again, I thought looked good, but they didn’t fit the style.