I decided to begin with my barrel, I felt though it is a simple prop its design can be pushed to be something impressive. To begin I decided to quickly sketch up a design to go off in my sketch book, despite this obviously being disadvantagous in the modelling phase as applying this to the image planes would yeild unsuitable reference imagery unless I scanned it in, however I thought the shape was simple enough to not require image plane set up, an image of the sketch below:
In this design I looked into what wood is most commonly used in places like Ireland to get an idea of what to base the colours of the wood off of, the result of which was Oak wood, this wood give me a better idea of how to sculpt the wood when I get to this phase. In addition I looked into diagrams of barrels to understand each part, for example the bung hole which can be placed on the midsection or top of a barrel.
I also looked into celtic imagery and symbols I could attach to the barrel, choosing symbols associated with protection as a barrel is meant to contain and protect. I looked also looked up the irish word for blacksmith and put a decal on the top of that text and the symbol. This is a design trait frequently used with barrels and so I thought it would be nice to incorporate.
Modelling
To begin I used a scene blockout model Danielle created to make the scale of the barrel consistent with the scene, then I created a cylinder with a subdivision height of 5 and used the bevel tool on the middle faces to create the bloated mid section you would generally see in a barrel. I could then edit how exaggerted this was with the soft select tool. Once that was done I duplicated the base and added additional edge loop around the barrel, using the “extract faces operation” on the selected face loops to create rings around the barrel. Then I deleted the duplicate leaving a barrel with clean geometry and rings that wrap around it.
After repating this process I deleted the top section and bottom then extracted the inner faces to give the barrel thickness. I then created a separate cylinder for the lid of the barrel. I wanted to do this so there could be sealed an unsealed barrels in the scene similar to the concept. Lastly I used the MASH tool in Maya to create an array around the rings of bolts. I created both circular and rectangular bolts to again match the concept. Using mash you can create arrays and have them line up with quick select sets, I found this to be the most effective approach, it also means in the UV phase I only have to UV the model the MASH network references rather than the whole set. Below is the video I used to do this:
https://youtu.be/MgSWROyccCI
Once I had an intial blockout done I decided to extract the faces around the barrel to create planks.
At this point I was told this method would be incredibly time consuming and I was also criticised for using the default subdivion values for the cylinder and not having the subdivision being divisible by eight which generally makes modelling easier in later phases. This also made the low poly nature of the model more noticable and so I recreated the model from the ground up and decided to make the planks a material. This was made easier due to a video made by 3DEX in which he makes an entire barrel out of a Substance Material, video below:
https://youtu.be/apa2DKNDINs
Having a material like this I could make variations for different uses in the scene, like the ceiling of the forge.
Lastly to adjust the silhoutte of the barrel I combined the model and used the Lattice tool so everything would evenly transform. Then I separated the lid and applied a lambert for the barrel and lid, in preparation for UVing.
Additional to note I bevelled most edges on this model and likely others to come to give them a sharper form when smoothed, that and edge loops around certain edges,
UV
To UV I simply used a cylinderical projection and placed a seam along the back as you are not likely to see the model from the back. Making sure the textile density matched between all UV shell.
Texturing
To begin I exported my wood material into substance painter as a .sbar to make this process more convenient for both me and my teammates to use, I then applied it to the barrel with a black mask.
To texture the metal I purchased a stylised material pack to assist in texturing below:
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/kok/stylized-metal-smart-materials
I realised while texturing in order to use generators to get metal edge wear, dirt and other aspects on the textures I would have to create a curvature map and ambient occlusion map, I did not have access to Zbrush and so I had to do this in Maya using this tutorial:
This lead to odd results in Substance Painter when applied such as Ambient Occlusion shadows being too dark and curvature map overlap. I fixed this manually in photoshop. You can see the result of me manually brushing these maps up as the curvature is inconsistent. Lastly I found turning the roughness down on all the materials helped emphasize the brush stroke appearance of both my materials and the texture pack I applied.
