Week 4 - Thursday: Modelling a Chandelier

During this week I have been practicing my prop modelling skills. I have been watching a series of tutorials on Pluralsight.com by 3D artist Dan Cox. He discusses the fastest methods to create props and focuses on ways to optimize the assets.

A large part of the course is spent using ZBrush which has illustrated to me the importance of using digital sculpting in my workflow. Cox was able to sculpt a high poly mesh in ZBrush and then toggling between varying levels of detail using Subdivision levels. Lowering the polycount in this way is incredibly helpful as it keeps the sculpt's silhouette intact across the different levels of detail.

I have tried to lower the polycount of my models in 3DS before but I have had to be very careful when doing so because deleting the edges and vertices of a model manually can sometimes make the low poly's silhouette too different from the high poly version. Because ZBrush has some great tools for retopologizing a model such as "dynamesh," I can always import my high poly models from 3DS Max into the software and use its tools instead. This won't give me as much control as if I had sculpted in ZBrush to begin with but it will save me time in my current workflow.

I have also been browsing the Polycount forums and trying to determine what differences there are between a game artist environment pipeline and prop artist work pipeline. I found a short thread on Polycount with the general consensus being that depending on the studio, I may have to do both environment modelling (with care for composition) and prop modelling (working in isolation on prop assets where there placement within the level is not one of my duties).

With this in mind I will be creating props that I can both use in my environment, but are also good enough to stand up to scrutiny on their own. I have created a chandelier asset that will be one of the focal points within my environment.

The high poly chandelier model. I only created one arm so that I could duplicate it once it was textured.

I started by creating a single arm that would hold the candelsticks and then exploded the model so that I could bake it in Substance Painter:

On the left is the low poly model and on the right is the exploded mesh ready for texturing in Substance Painter. 

Below you can see the texture maps I created for the chandelier in Substance Painter:

The texture maps I baked out of Substance Painter.

 Below you can see the finished asset in Unreal Engine:

The chandelier in Unreal Engine.

I will be modeling some other props for my portfolio during the next few days as I really enjoyed creating this. I will be using ZBrush to help retopologize some of the geometry as this helped a lot with this asset.

COX, D. (2016) Game Prop Modeling Fundamentals [Online] Available from: https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/game-prop-modeling-fundamentals [Accessed: 14/06/2018] 

POLYCOUNT (2011) Difference between Environment and Prop Artists? [Online] Available from: https://polycount.com/discussion/82424/difference-between-environment-and-prop-artists [Accessed: 14/06/2018]