Week 3 – Day 4 -“Blitz Brief”

Date: 21/1/16

Today we were given a task, set out by the game company Blitz in London, where we had to design and model rubbish, based on a strict brief. The model had to be photorealistic, and reference the images that they produced. It could only contain 500 triangles, and use a single 1024×1024 texture. After a few sketches, I decided to model the “Soft Serviettes” box in the reference photo below. 

The modelling process wasn’t too difficult. The hardest part was trying to model a low poly asset, while still keeping as much detail as possible. I did this by deleting as many of the inside faces as possible. The hardest part was definitely trying to layout the UVs in a clever way to maximise the resolution. Seeing as the entire UV could only be 1024 by 1024 for the entire asset, I decided the best approach was to overlap as many UVs as possible. I really wanted to introduce a corrugation typical to cardboard  boxes on the exposed edges of any cardboard, so I did this by overlapping all of these edge UVs on on one corrugation texture. The effect came out pretty well: I also created a specular map, to add highlights to dome of the parts of the texture. I added a soft card texture to my specular map to bring out some of the crisp edges in the corrugation, and I also made all stickers, tape and marker marks varying degrees of specular to add to the realism.

 The result is slightly different to the references image, but only because my model adds some variation.

In total this model took around 8 hours to model, UV and texture. It consists of only 312 triangles, meaning I could add some more detail if I had time. If I did have more time I would like to add an occlusion layer to highlight the depth in the model. I would also like to model some more loose rubbish, like bottles and cans, and scatter them around the object, which would eat up them spare triangles pretty quickly. Finally I would like to add a bump map to  the model in an attempt to bring out some of the corrugation and damage more. These are all pretty easy to do, but I decided better not to do them so as to stick within the time frame. I will add more in the future.

Summary:

Today we did a brief set out by Blitz where we had to model rubbish in a low-poly but photorealistic way. The project basically examined everything we have learned to date. I was pretty happy with how my model turned out, but UVing the model took a bit too long. I would like to trim my UV time down, to give me more time to model and texture.