Year 2 Term 1 GamesArt: Pt.1

For the High poly asset project, i decided i would like to model an object that could later be used for a character model, so i settled on a melee weapon very early on. I wanted to create something that would have quite a high fantasy feel to it, but also provide plenty of options for interesting texturing ideas towards the latter stages of the project.

Eventually i found the above image, and despite being a screen of a current model, rather than a photo of a real world object, after a discussion with my tutor Phil, we decided the idea provided plenty of variation to add realistic textures, and so my design was settled upon.

I choose to begin with, what i viewed as the main focal point of the Axe, the human skull at the center, starting out with a basic sphere, and manipulating it to form the general shape of a human skull reference.

Once the main features were roughly in, i duplicated the first half across.

Using a similiar process i created the lower jaw from a cube and duplicated the halves over.

Once the skull was starting to look close, i began to model the metal fixings that would be bolted to the skull in order to support the general structure of the axe.

I then used quad draw and traced the shape of the axe blade directly onto the reference image, before extruding it out into a solid object.

Simple cylinder for the axe handle.

Using the same quad draw and extrude technique to create the various elements of the axe heads structure.

Once most of the Axe head components have been added.

The wrappings/binding for the axe handle was made from a Taurus, which i then unwrapped and then duplicated down so that each one would carry across the U.V's from the original.

Experimenting with a couple of methods for creating the bone/spinal column section that joins the skull and the axehead with the handle.

A few renders of the final Maya build for the high poly version of the Axe.

Using alpha's and the drag rectangle tool i started to add the wear and tear, scratches, nicks and chips to the axe head, varying the scratches upon the flat metal axe blades, the shipped skull, and the worn, rusty bronze fixings.

When i was content with the level of detail within the axe head, i imported the handle as a sub tool and used the Surface>Noisemaker tool to add in the woodgrain.

And then merged the layers down ready to export out as an OBJ.

With the high poly model ready, i returned to the Maya file and set about creating a low poly variation by removing unnecessarily edge loops from the geometry, pushing the poly count down as far as i could without losing too much definition.

Next up I unwrapped each element of the low poly model and saved a U.V snapshot.

With the model unwrapped I exported the low poly as an OBJ and along with the high poly OBJ from earlier, set up XNormal to bake a Normal and an Ambient occlusion map.

Once the maps were baked I applied them to the low Polly model.

Before assigning colors to the different parts to create a ColorID map.

Using the Color ID's within Quixel suite I assigned the desired textures and materials to each individual element, as well as dirt layers, ready to load into Unreal.



The final model rendered with Unreal engine.