In my team,I took charge of creating the chandelier which would be going into everyones individual rooms, I began researching the different types of chandeliers that would be typically found in dining rooms in mansions around the victorian era and i took some screenshots of the chandeliers that stood out the most to me.
Here I used these images as a reference for when I was creating my own chandelier in maya, I knew it was going to be quite tricky to build so I wanted to make sure I had a good reference beforehand. I created my chandelier using curve tools and polygons and created the first draft of my chandelier.
Here is the first model of my chandelier, I added lots of intricate detailing, however due to this I ran into a few problem with the poly count as we agreed on making low poly models to help with the final rendering in Unreal. I had to begin working on my chandelier to get the poly count down, to do this I began to delete edges and faces that weren’t seen on the model, however doing this then caused quite a lot of problems with the uv’ing of the chandelier. Moving forward, I then decided to make the model more simplistic all together, so I began deleting some parts of the model to reduce the poly count.
Here are few screenshots I took during the process of breaking down my chandelier.
However, I still struggled with the UV’s with my chandelier as it cause a lot of modelling problems, I had some help from Alec and Henry for the uv’ing of the chandelier due to the shapes and the obscure shape of the chandelier.
Here is the final way I modelled the chandelier, this ended up with a lower poly count and I was still happy with how the chandelier turned out, I wanted to make sure the chandelier still had that victorian look about it as with the other models I didn’t get that feel to it. Furthermore, I was happy with my end model and wanted to export it into substance to begin giving it an old look before putting it into my dining room in Unreal.
Here are some of the final screenshots of my chandelier, my next challenge was to make the jewels and lightbulbs glass in Unreal, I found some youtube tutorials on how to do this and incorporated that into my own chandelier.