For week three I was tasked with creating a high and low poly version of a crate so that next week we could move onto baking the asset for use in a theoretical game. While there was a tutorial available to create a specific crate, I have a very cool crate in my house which I thought I would make instead. Below are the pictures of the crate I would be trying to recreate in Maya. There was just a couple of issues with trying to recreate this specific crate. Much of the crates structure is actually rather basic, there are no holes present for the handles and much of the aesthetics are in the texturing and damage, neither of which I am currently aware how to make in Maya.
Starting the design was simple enough, I used basic cubes which I scaled and thinned into the various shapes to make the handle side. This included making the thicker handle cube. On the source box one of the handles are placed on at a slight angle, I liked this design and so made both handles noticeably off quilter for my asset.
After this came designing one of the side pieces of the crate. To do this I made two further copies of the vertical struts I had made on the handle side and added them to the different sized side panel sections. Because the real-life crate is made of different sized pieces of wood, I felt like the model should imitate this. As such I designed each panel differently to give it that handmade look. This is why instead of duplicating the side and handle I had already made I created them from scratch also. The final touch to this stage is the handle, which I rotated so that the handle strut was on at the opposite angle to its twin. While this isn’t the case in the original (one handle is on straight with the real box) I felt like this gave the design more detail.
Now came the time to smooth the different cubes I had created. I began with the wooden sides of the box and found that if I clicked on smooth preview the cubed would turn themselves into strange spheres. I rectified this by using the multi cut tool and holding the control key. This allowed me to place edge loops into the shapes by the edges to that when the object was smoothed it would retain its shape.
For the handle struts, I found using the smooth mesh tool didn’t quite give the effect I was after. But if I went into edge mode and bevelled the edges of the shape it gave me the nice curves I was searching for. On the curves that face outward from the box I added ten segments. This gave the edges a nice smooth curve. I then decided that for the edges which face toward the crate I would set the bevel to five segments. This meant that while they were smoothed it was a much sharper end than on the outside of the handle. I feel like this gave the design extra detail. After this i used the multi cut tool and smoothed the struts of the crate.
At this point the crate was technically done. However, as I thought would happen before I began, I felt the design was a little too basic and had lost the charm of the original box. I felt the design was a little too plain and felt a good way of adding interest to the design was to add some nails. Now while the real box is nailed together the nails are pushed into the wood and so would be very difficult to model. I felt a good compromise was to make a nail asset and place them so that they are protruding from the crate in a nice-looking way.
To make the nail I began with a basic cylinder. To which I used the multi cut tool again to add and edge loop not far from one edge of the cylinder. After this I selected the new smaller faces and extruded them to give me the nail head. Next I used the vertex mode to select the point where all the faces meet on the bottom half of the cylinder. I then extended this vertex very far so as to give me a extra long nail. Finally, when the faces and been manipulated to look as if they were a real nail I deleted most of the faces of the ides. Leaving me with just the head section of the nail, which I could then place around the box in such a way to make it look nailed together.
Once I had placed a number of copies of that nail around the box however, I still felt like there was something missing from the design. The handles specifically to me did not look right with just a nail head sticking out of them. To solve this, I decided I would create a screw head asset to go with the nails. I didn’t know the best way to create a slat head screw end so I thought this would be a good time to experiment with the Boolean tool. I created the basic shape for the screw in a very similar way to the nail, I just added another slight lip on wither side and extruded the inner face in which I could cut the grove for the slot. I thought that if I made a rectangle of a good thickness and then used Boolean it would cut me a channel through the face. This failed however when the Boolean simple erased where the two shapes met. Leaving me with a large whole which I couldn’t simply fill as I would be back without the groove.
Eventually I found a method to cut the groove which while didn’t look right when rough, once I had smoothed the object gave me a design, I was happy with. I used the multi cut tool again to cut a channel out of the faces on the end of the cylinder. While I doubt this cut was perfectly straight it looked closely enough, I was happy with it. Then I used the extrude tool to push these faces in, deleting the now compromised faces on the outside of the circle and filling them again use the fill hole tool. Now while the shape was rough it showed and untextured black lip which I could not remove. Luckily though when I smoothed the object this lip disappeared and gave me a nice screw head asset.
Now that I had created all the assets, I needed I simply spread the screw and nail heads out in such a way that makes the crate appear crudely put together. The end result of this is a crate I am happy with.
I was a little confused by what exactly the difference was between a low poly and high poly asset. I didn’t know if the crate I had just made would be classed as high poly or low poly. I spoke to Tom for advice, and from what I could understand a low poly version is basically just the basic shape of the high poly object without the details such as nail or screw head and curved edges. So, to make the lox poly object I simply repeated the first few steps of what I did with the high poly object. I created basic cubed which I shaped and moulded into place without smoothing them. Thus, giving me a low poly an high poly version of the crate. (I coloured the high poly grey for distinction)
