The Chair

Saturday, 15 August 2015

Monday, 18 May 2015

Overview

Create a 3D model including it's environment.

The theme is "The Chair", what chair demands more attention than a throne? I thought a throne would match the theme really well in not such an obvious way, especially as the task was to create a scene. I thought this would be a really fun scene to create, that would keep all the focus on the chair, which is what I wanted. I also thought it would be great to design the theme with a certain character in mind. So I thought to myself who is my favourite 'King' in video games....I had great fun designing this throne room, I hope you like it too.

Final Renders

The final piece

Bird's-eye

Candlelight

Close-up

Above are the renders of the final scene.

I used a total of 7 textures and 4,988 triangles for the whole scene.

The scene is 5 metres by 5 metres by 5 metres.

I enjoyed my time working on this mini project and I am pleased with the result. My goal was to create a scene with a semi-realistic aesthetic, and a cartoon feel that could be found in a modern platform game, that focussed on round shapes and bright colours. I think I managed to produce a well made scene that envisions my original ideas and lives up to the source material. I think the combinations of colours, materials, textures and lighting works really well to create an exciting scene that would be fun to watch characters animate.

I am glad I took the approach I did because I think it turned out well, and I thoroughly enjoyed creating the scene. I haven't done a lot of low poly work in the past so it really adds to the challenge of modelling, but it helps you learn how to create efficient meshes and is very rewarding. If I was to do a similar project in the future I would take a very different approach to challenge myself in new ways and focus on different skills. I would aim for a much more realistic, dark and gritty scene, perhaps one that could be set in a horror game with an old creepy chair as the focus point. I would also make it a much busier scene with more models and textures.

I appreciate you taking the time to view and read my blog, thanks a lot.

Texturing

Screen shots of UV mapping textures

The list of textures used in the scene.

Textures

These are the final textures I used for the scene, they are all from free to use online sources, for some of the textures I changed the size and colouring to suit my scene and to make sure I did not go over my texture limit.

Renders

Analysing progress

These are all the rendered images I took as I progressed through my design.

Here you can see an early render of just the chair and the hammer, it is a very noisy image, later on I discovered how to improve the quality of the render to avoid noise and fireflies, by using a combination of render samples, clamping indirect light, using multiple importance for objects and lights, and turning off caustics, in this case we don't need them and it will render quicker without trying to calculate caustics, they are more necessary with really realistic scenes using glass for example.

I like the idea of one of the final renders having a similar viewpoint to this, showing a close up of the chair and hammer so you can see some extra detail.
At this point I had not considered scale of the models, well except for the chair in ratio to the hammer, but considering my room/scene is five by five metres the chair shouldn't be taking up the majority of the room. I tried to make the sizing of the objects pretty realistic, taking into consideration that the character the chair is intended for is a rather wide character, the chair is 1 metre wide, so I think that is plenty wide enough.

Getting more of a feel for the environment now. The main aspects of the scene are now laid out, so it's time to think about extra details and textures.

I moved the hammer slightly so you can see more of it and it is laying down in a more natural way. I also made the red carpet at this stage which looks pretty cool. I made the floor very reflective and I added some more detail to the windows. As you can see the windows look pretty weird at this point and needed a lot more work, things don't always go perfectly the first time round. To get the right look for the windows without using heaps of triangles took a few attempts, but I was pleased with the result in the end.

Here you can see the windows are looking a lot better but still not perfect.

Throughout the project I played around with the textures and materials trying to get the right look. I made the gold material look less realistic to match my theme better, I used my character reference image and tried to match the colours as closely as possible.

I liked the models but I could not get the environment to look right, I couldn't put my finger on it, but the scene wasn't tying together with the models, the scene looked too sterile and a bit too realistic, the scene just didn't gel.

I decided I needed to change the columns because they didn't match my curved minimalist theme. I played around with textures a lot more and I also added torches to the scene.

By adding more colour to the scene and redoing the staircase completely it brought the scene to life and it was beginning to gel a lot better and suit the overall theme much better, it now looked more like a scene from a colourful cartoon style video game with a semi realistic tone.

Here I added flames to the torches for added realism for the scene and added some flags to complete the scene. Although the flags don't look quite right yet because I did not use enough verts in an effort to reduce the triangle count.
I turned down the reflection on the gold again, which I think I have done on nearly every render, to more closely match the colouring of the reference image.
I tilted the camera so you can get a better look at the steps, I really like the floor texture, it reminds me of scenes from Sonic the Hedgehog.
One point in the brief was the chair will never be seen from below or behind, so I used this to my advantage to save triangles.
The carpet on the stairs needs tweaking, it's looking a bit unnatural because of the harsh curvature of the steps.

I think the scene is almost finished now, it just needs some tweaking. I think it is looking good and I am near to the triangles limit, I also don't want to put too much in the scene as I am worried it will be overkill, I like the minimalist approach and it keeps the attention on the chair. I think the bright white light through the windows works well and doesn't distract from the scene, I chose this approach because I liked the look and it saved me from having to use more textures for the world, although I have plenty of textures left on my texture limit. The light through the windows lights the scene beautifully, I added an extra internal light to brighten things upeven more, and to keep the gold looking shiny and bring more attention to the chair.

Development

Designing the throne room

The three most important aspects of the brief are the 5000 triangles limit, the texture limit and scene size, so I constantly reminded myself of this as I designed my scene.
The first thing I did was to create a room from a cube that was 5x5x5 metres.

As the chair was going to be the focus point of the scene I spent time working on the chair first, and wanted it to be more or less finished before working on the rest of the scene. I often use the Mirror Modifier because it saves heaps of time and keeps things symmetrical. I kept my 3D model as close to my original sketch as possible as I quite liked the design, I think it has a really nice shape to it. I first modelled the two rounded cushions before creating the frame. I created the frame with iso spheres and cylinders, the top of the frame by duplicating the top of the top cushion and using the Solid Modifier.

I really liked the idea of having the kings logo as a piece at the top of the chair and to have feet of the chair so they look the same as his feet. I thought it would be cool to have two big feet for the chair rather than four feet. The whole scene was designed with the colour scheme of the king in mind, conveniently this included regal colours.

For the chair, rather than using textures I thought it looked much better to use simple materials in blender to give it the look I wanted. I created a gold material for the frame and a velvet material for the cushions, I went on to use these materials in other areas of the scene too.
As the chair was the focus of the scene I didn't hold back too much on triangles but I was still very careful as I knew I needed plenty left of the 5000 limit to create the scene. It was perhaps ambitious of me to aim for such a rounded look for the chair and scene while using few polys, to get a really smooth look you need a lot of polygons/triangles, but I think I managed to achieve a pretty good look in the end, in line with the style I wanted.

Once I was happy with the look of the chair, I created the hammer. I thought it would be really cool to have the hammer leaning in the corner of the scene. This was one of the most enjoyable parts of modelling the scene. It is such a simple effective design, it was great piecing it all together.

I first carefully modelled each part of the hammer using cylinders I manipulated. I cut the model into pieces to texture separately.

I used Gimp to colour the star logo.

UV mapping the textures to position them properly on the model.

The wood texture looks really great, I used the displacement effect with the node editor like I did before with my wooden chair. This works really well for wood textures, to add extra depth to the texture. I used a small part of the same texture for the handle, and I made a chrome material for the edge of the hammer. I really like the way the hammer looks, I think it looks enough like the source material but is subtly different enough to be my own, this was the one aspect of the scene that was not an original design. I think it fits in with the semi realistic yet cartoon stylised feel of the rest of the scene.

Next I shaped the windows in the back wall of the scene. Once I was happy with the windows I deleted the wall and replaced it with a clean wall/plane that I placed the windows in, this cut down the triangle count and made texturing the wall easier.

I made the steps out of extruded and shaped cubes. I made the red carpet out of a plane that I made solid and shaped around the steps.

I wanted the edge of the carpet to match the king's jacket so I created a white fluffy edge, using hair particles.

I used the node editor to get the right look for the white fluff.

I used cubes to model the columns, I really liked the look of these but I felt they didn't go with the style of my scene in the end, so I modelled them again with cylinders so they were more round an minimalist. I also didn't like the steps so I completely remade them. I added some torches modelled from iso spheres including flames created using the node editor and a plane with an Array Modifier. I finished the scene with flags made from planes with the few triangles I had left so I had to be careful, I think I had enough to make them look fairly realistic, and I quite like the way they look.