Tuesday, 22 April 2014

Cartoon Gun Assest Creation


Our second industry standard test was to create a cartoon-styled gun following a reference, with a very limited polygon count and texture size.

We had 800 Triangles, a 64x64 diffuse, a 128x128 specular and a 256x256 normal map.

We were given the drawing below as a reference, and I used the photo for an idea of how the specular and colour on a gun works.



This really put my mesh optimization skills to the test.

I started in Maya straight away, with a reference image in the background and a translucent material to keep the reference and object in sight at all times.




Once I had built the model and shaped it how I wanted, I had to optimize it in order to bring down the polygon count, and clean up a lot of topology along the way.






Once I had my model finished and my UVs laid out to make the most use of the small texture resolution, I stated creating the texture is photoshop.


For this we needed a Diffuse, Specular and Normal map.

I created a diffuse map in silver with varying tones as though light is hitting from the top, I organized the shine of my specular in the same way, and the normal I created in nDo, to add any other wanted detail that I couldn't before.






The final image of course looks better with the higher resolution textures, however the low resolution one I am happy with.





I learned a lot about where I made mistakes and how I can make it better. For example I should not have spent so long on a diffuse that will have such a small resolution, having said this I feel it worked for the cartoony look reasonably well. One of the main things that lets this down is that some hard edges need to be soft and the opposite is also true, which I may fix and post a new render.



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