UV-Unwrapping!

So over the past week or so I've been working on UV unwrapping my model.
UV unwrapping is crucial in order to texture the model properly which takes a lot of time and patience but once you have an understanding for how it works it becomes pretty simple.

Here is the before and after shot of my UV's on my lid for my treasure chest:

As you can see it's going to be much easier to texture in photoshop now instead of the horrible mess that it was previously. This is only the lid however, I still have to do the bottom box area which should be a lot easier. Then all I'll need to do is apply this to the model via a material, either a Lambert, Blinn or Phong. We will discuss that further in class though.
I'm fairly proud of my work so far. I'm interested to see how the final product will turn out and it's definitely the best 3D model I've made.

Next week I'll be going over the texturing details!

Week 1!

First week and already I'm excited.

Each week I'll be updating this blog as per part of my assessments during this trimester. It will contain my journey through learning how to model, texture, rig, animate, render and composite in Maya.

This week we are taking a look at treasure chests as that is the first object we are tasked with creating!
Some of the treasure chests we see in games can be radically different from really small to big enough to fit inside of. Some notable treasure chests are below:

This chest is actually an entrance to a world within the Nintendo 64 title "Banjo-Kazooie".

The idea is that we can create a treasure chest for a possible game, whether it be a board game to hold items or perhaps a video game chest with animations!







Some other examples of chests in gaming:

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword








Final Fantasy IV DS

Kingdom Hearts 2

(This image is good because it shows the topology of the chest itself and how it might have been modelled for the video game. The less tris it has the more efficient the game will run. Tris refer to the number of triangles that make up an object. It refers to the faces and what is rendered whilst the game is running)

This image is of a 3D model made by Image Propeller Studios and it shows the process behind how the 3D model is textured and kind of topology that is used in creating a 3D model. This is the kind of work I will be focusing on in the coming weeks slowly getting more advanced as time goes on.