3d Modelling: Assignment II + Exercise I - Hard Surface Modelling

 MODULE MMD 60804: 3D Modelling 

Tristan Vaughan Sleep - 0365120

Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

3D Modelling - Exercises

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MODULE INSTRUCTIONS:

“FEB - MARCH 2025: GCD 64904 / 3D MODELLING MODULE INFORMATION BOOKLET”

Assignment 1: Bathroom Interior Modelling (Weighted 20%)

Exercise I: Students of the cohort are expected to produce a themed Chessboard. Using the previously acquired skills from the previous exercises or any additional skills produced in this project. Students will be marked on their Strong lighting, effective composition, and high-quality rendering are essential. The final output must be presented using a look development workflow.

Project II: Students of the cohort are expected to produce a Prop/weapon which relates to the theme of Futuristic. Using the previously acquired skills from the previous exercises or any additional skills produced in this project. Students will be marked on their Strong lighting, effective composition, and high-quality rendering are essential. The final output must be presented using a look development workflow.

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PARTICIPATED LECTURES:

Chessboard Design:

Creating Chessboard: For this following exercise, students had been asked to further practise their skills  and design work by taking a pause and developing a Chessboard. This chessboard would include a stylised board, custom chess pieces as well as a creative display of the chessboard. While not complex of a task, this one felt more like a buffer to confirm if students were confident in the lessons they’ve learned thus far in the module. For the chessboard, I was inspired to make a minimalistic design which would be pieces mixed with metal. All chess pieces would share a base and would have customised heads to identify the piece. For the lighting of the scene, I had used a similar set-up seen with the basic shapes layout but it was now focused on an object without a backdrop and reflective pieces. Overall a simple yet effective design given the task.

“Exercise I: Submission Document.”

Assignment I - Futuristic Weapons:

Gathering + Developing Reference: For this next project, students have been tasked with making a custom weapon or tool based on a futuristic style - expected to go through the full development stages and producing a final model with textures. Before beginning the project, I would once again begin by developing a reference sheet to have visuals as well as an informed decision on what I’m designing. What is important this time round is identifying the strong features within the references and remixing them together to make a new design. This is a recommended strategy as it can lead you to creating new designs. For my model, I went with the idea of making an Axe as it was something that felt slightly separate from the genre (and would need to be restylised), but also because it would present a unique challenge with its unique shapes.

Blockout Design: With a rough layout determined from the reference art, I would be able to begin building a rough blockout. The importance of creating a blockout is to get a sense of scale of what the object should look like while also highlighting what the most important features are of the design.  With this in mind, I used a series of shapes without editing them too much (only editing in terms of edgeloops etc.). When looking at the concept art, I was also sure to include more detail on sections where smaller details would be more common, leaving me less in the dark when designing. 

Completed Modelling: now that I have a rough layout created, I began cleaning up the model and adding additional details and higher resolutions. An important lesson I learnt during this assignment was breaking the model down into separate pieces which makes modelling a lot easier - I’d previously begun designing the model as one object which is a professional mindset without the necessary skill to back it up. When making separate components, all pieces would be modelled per material which would be useful during the texturing phase. This phase was not without its difficulty however, the main difficulty came in managing multiple objects and trying to edit multiple shapes together - a lot of the parts would get in the way which makes it hard to work with. Overall, the modelling took a good day worth of time to complete - with the model completed, I could now begin texturing and posing.

Materials + Lighting: In this last section, the main objective was to texture the model based on its perceived material and colours. As of this point, texturing was normally not a difficult task as due to the in-depth ability to customise said textures - this time it proved a bit challenging. The main difficulty came in managing the range of textures. For the design, there are a series of black materials next to one another which can blend together at some angles with some lighting. I would need to find a better arrangement to make sure the details would be discerned despite being near similar colours. Looking at the end product, while I’m not too happy with the colour dominance, I still believe it looks alright and is ready for texturing.

For the lighting, I wanted to try something more unique and looked for more examples of lighting arrangements to see what would be more interesting ways to light objects. I’d ultimately come upon a light layout which is used in 3D render advertisements and would use both complementary and contrasting lights to make the scene look a bit more interesting. I would say for the most part that the lighting turned out very well despite the weird graphical error which causes the lights to cut-off perfectly in lines (as seen on the back of the axe.) While not world-ending, it is an interesting occurrence and is something I should consider finding a solution. 

“Assignment II: Submission Document.”