Game Scene Final Project Post

 The final for my 230 modeling class was a four-week project that had us replicate buildings to from a popular game. Out of the games provided, I chose to do world of warcraft. This was primarily because of the art style, as it was still realistic but took many artistic liberties regarding the proportions and models of different objects. We have to use modular modeling techniques for this project, basically meaning portions of a build that could be copy and pasted or duplicated. We were instructed to have two buildings, 2 props, and a centerpiece of sorts. Below are the references I used for the entirety of the project.

Building 1 (Orrery):

Building 2 (Observatory):

Prop 1 (Lantern):

Prop 2 (Totem):

Centerpiece (Shrine):

Now we had 4 weeks total to do this. And I will be honest, my work ethic during this period was rather poor. The first week I did nothing besides getting my references. The third week was Thanksgiving break, in which I also didn't make any progress. Half way through the third week we had a progress report and that's when I realized I really had to get it in gear. I'm still happy with the work that I was able to complete in a week in a half, but would have saved myself a whole lot of stress if I had simply divided the workload across the given 4 weeks, or at the very least 3 weeks.

Regardless, that's in past now, so I'll show you what I started with. And by started, I mean have my maya file get corrupted after about 7 hours of modeling. The good news that came from this is that I had to redo all my models, but I had made mistakes and done things far inefficiently the first time around, so this time things were done far nicer, and also faster. Another thing I did starting from that point was make individual save files roughly every 20 minutes, or anytime a significant edit was made, this action saved me from multiple significant issues further down the road (2 more curroptions). Also, because this, it was quite easy to go back to early iterations to collect screenshots for this assignment.

Individual project save files made every 20 minutes:

Week 3.5

About 16 hours of modeling as done starting from that Wednesday to Friday afternoon. I had fully modeled all 3 props and both buildings to a quality I was happy with. My roommate who was also in the same class was irritated with the level of progress I made in such a short amount of time, as they had started the project the day it was assigned and I had already surpassed them.

All Models:

Orrery wireframe in:

Week 4

I hadn't worked over the following weekend, so I started again on Monday. I worked on the project every day of this week, but also with a more relaxed work flow. I took my time and did the UVing in 3 days, and the IDing the day after. While modeling I had made every single part that was a different color, a different object. This would make UVing a breeze as I didn't need to do anything but drag and drop colors. Likewise, when I started texturing, things went very smoothly, I finished all of the texturing on Friday. Saturday, I took a break, and on Sunday I began transferring things to Unity, and creating the scenes terrain. I did not have much time to waste during the terrain modeling portion, as it was 9PM when I had begun, and the project was due at 12 that same night.

UVs:

IDs:

Texturing:

Terrain:

Week 5

I had submitted the project on time, and was happy with the final results. The final file was 1.4GB and took me an hour to submit with the school Wi-Fi. Obviously, there were some very serious issues with my time management that resulted in my rushing the project to literally the last minute. Was I happy with my work, yes? Could it have been significant better and the production behind been far less stressful If I better managed my time, also yes. Further along the road I will most definitely be using my time far more efficiently to avoid such issues.

Final Product: