Week 5 - Tuesday: Props Armchair

Today I completed a high poly prop for my mansion environment. I was inspired by the artwork of Joseph Hobbs a former student in the year before me. His Artstation portfolio is of a very high quality and his is the level that I am trying to reach by the end of this year. I was impressed by an armchair model which he had created, and wanted to test myself and see if I could create one of my own.

The armchair model created by Joseph Hobbs.

I wanted mine to have a more contemporary feel and finally settled on a design that I liked, this leather chesterfield armchair:

Vintage leather armchairs.

I created a high poly model in 3DS max and manually added creases to areas where I thought the surface should be taut. I had a Turbo Smooth modifier applied to the model which I toggled on and off to check whether the creases looked correct:

Toggling between smoothed and unsmoothed versions of the model.

I also created some renders of the high poly model to add to my portfolio which you can see below:

Rendered images of the high poly armchair.

Once the high poly model was completed, I created a low poly counterpart ready for surface transfer in Substance Painter. Normally I tend to be as stingy as possible when it comes to the amount of polygons I use for the low poly model. This has resulted in some ugly silhouettes for my past assets however and I wanted to avoid that this time, so I used more polygons on the edges of the armchair to make it look less jagged:

The high poly armchair next to the low poly model.

To avoid the issue of incorrect details projecting onto unwanted surfaces, I made sure to explode both the high poly and low poly models when I exported them into Substance Painter:

The exploded armchair model ready to be taken into Substance Painter for texturing.

Below you can see the fully textured model as seen in Substance Painter:

This is the portfolio piece that I will be adding to my Artstation page.

The completed model is 3510 Tri's in total:

I have included a wireframe shot in my portfolio to show employers that I can surface transfer properly.

Overall I am very pleased with this piece as I feel individual assets are something that was missing in my portfolio. Whilst I am pleased with how the model turned out, I think that had I sculpted the high poly version in ZBrush instead of using 3DS Max, it could have looked better. Joseph used ZBrush to create the details for his model and I feel because of this, he was able to achieve a higher level of detail and fidelity.

My modelling process is an area that I would like to improve on as I have a lot of ornate assets left to model and not a lot of time to do so. Whilst I acknowledge that ZBrush would likely be a better tool to use for this purpose, I don't want to risk investing the time into learning to use it like a professional. I feel that any work I create with it now could end up being sub-par due to my inexperience with the program. As this is my stand out project, I am going to stick with what I know in terms of 3D modelling for now. However it is clear to me that ZBrush is the way to go for high poly details both in terms of time and quality. I spent a lot of time moving individual vertices of my model around to make the creases for the chair, when I could have just sculpted those details straight onto the model in ZBrush.

HOBBS, J. (2017), Vintage Armchair [Online Image]. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/E0kL8 [Accessed: 19/06/2018].

THE CHESTERFIELD COMPANY (2018), Manchester Vintage Leather Fireside Armchairk [Online Image]. Available at: https://www.thechesterfieldcompany.com/leather-armchairs/manchester-vintage-leather-fireside-armchair/ [Accessed: 19/06/2018].