Game Prop Metal Barrel Workflow

My last prop was a variant of the Wooden Barrel Prop. After looking at the images in my workflow, I noticed that one of the barrels in Maya looked like it could be used for a metal barrel. I decided to alter it's shape a bit and give it and overhang on the top and the bottom, along with two small humps in the middle of it to make it look more like a metal barrel as opposed to a wooden one. There wasn't much editing to do here, except for touching up some extrusions in the lid areas.

I searched CG textures for a metal barrel texture and found a great one right away. I cartooned them, but I hated the colors that were coming out from them. I spent a lot of time tweaking the contrast, color values and hue until I found something I really liked. I put the textures together in the same manner I did for the wooden barrel and applied it to the Maya object.

This time, in crazy bump, instead of using the cartoon texture, I used the original texture file to get more subtle indents and what not onto the barrel. After putting everything together, I decided to smooth it so that way the overhang had more of a natural look rather than sticking out sharply.

Game Prop Wooden Barrel Workflow

My Wooden Barrel Prop was the most time consuming out of all my props. It went through a lot of steps to get to where it is, and overall, it is the prop I am most proud of as well.

For the Wooden Barrel, I started off dong research on the exact dimensions of wine barrels. I measured out the two cylinder shapes in unity, one for the width at the bottom and top of the barrels, and one for the width at the center of the barrel. My next step was to create areas for the metal rings. I made a a very wide, short cylinder the that was the dimensions of a metal bar and placed it in almost the exact positions (which I calculated) that it would be on a real wine barrel. I used the insert edge loop tool and the vertex snap tool to align everything correctly. After that, I had to change the shape of the barrel so it would have a curvature to it, unfortunately I ran into a lot of trouble here and extrusions and moving of vertex's just weren't working. What I ended up doing was writing and solving for an equation of an ellipse in which the barrel could be contained. I found values on a graph of what the width would be at the points of the metal bars and center of the barrel. I used the short cylinder and altered its width to fit the equation and used the vertex snap tool to make each line fit what the width of the short cylinder was. When this process was complete, I just needed to use the extrude tool at the bottom and top of the barrel to create a division that I would be able to take a UV screenshot of to model the lid of the barrel.

Once all the fun was finished in Maya, I moved to editing my textures. I ended up reusing the cartoon wood texture I used for my crate and slightly altered the contrast. I found an image on CG textures of rivets which I converted to a cartoon and darkened. I placed these rivets in the areas I had designated for them in the UV Map from Maya. For the lid, I took the edge of the wooden texture and altered it's colors so it would be a darker wood. I then rotated and adjusted different pieces of the edge to form a circle shape that fit the UVs from the snapshot.

I tested these textures individually on the sides and bottom and top of the barrel and they looked good, but when I attached the textures, they came out to be extremely blurry. I went back into Pixlr and edited the textures to fit more nicely and it showed in Maya. I also went and extruded the metal bars and added a UV for the new faces.

When I put the texture into crazy bump, I didn't like how the barrel was looking with the normal map, so instead, I made a custom bump map that extruded the rivets a bit making the barrel really pop.

Game Prop Crate Workflow

This crate....there are a lot of things I can say about this crate...most of them quite unkind. When I thought I had completed it, I misinterpreted something in class about the UVs causing me to redo and rebuild the entire thing from scratch, only to find out that what I had was fine.

I started off building a basic cube, 1m x 1m. From there I used the insert edge loop tool to map out the basic shape of the wood planks I wanted to add. I then built a bunch of different cubes and used the vertex snap tool to align the individual planks in the way I wanted. When the planks were all in place, I deleted the faces on the inside of the crate object that would not be seen or used.

I then moved on to the texture file where I looked around on CG Textures for a wood texture. When I found the one I thought would look best for my crate, I popped it into Catoon.Pho.to and made a cartoon version of the wood. Using this texture, I mixed and matched where I placed the UVs for the wood so that way the crate looked like it wasn't just a copied texture. Everything up until this point was great.

When I misheard the issue with UVing, I thought I had done everything incorrectly and restarted the process from scratch, using only two cubes to create the crate as opposed to the individual cubes I used last time. I also had to do some serious alterations to the textures which changed everything around and took up a lot of my time. I created bump and spec maps for my new giant texture in Maya and it just did not look good.

After talking with some other students working on their project, I realized I could do the UVs the way I had them last time, and so I did! This made everything look a lot nicer, and I used the original wooden texture as compared to the cartoon one in crazy bump to make it look a bit nicer. The final product came out looking good.

Game Prop Coin Workflow

The coin, I believe, was actually quite a bit more difficult than the traffic cone. Although the build looks a bit easier, there was a lot more work to be done with the texturing of this piece.

To start off, I used a cylinder shape and split the faces so that the top and bottom were attached and the edge was it's own piece. I modeled it to the scale of a Quarter. The reason I separated these face sections was to test UVs and see how they looked without putting together a final texture right away.

Once I finished the shape, I moved to creating a texture. Looking through CG Textures, I found a coin texture that I liked and put it into Cartoon.Pho.to. Unfortunately, the cartoon coin came out looking terrible, so I continued looking. I found a statue face that seemed like it could work, but cartoonised, the face looked way too realistic. I got a lot of feedback from my classmates for creating the coin face, I went through different animals, leaves, fires, and faces, and finally I found a cartoon face texture that was used as a warning sign that everyone seemed to like. I then combined different aspects from all three of the textures I found. I used the Coin to darken and apply a grainy coin feel to the image, I used the statue outline to create the outline for the coin and I used the face for the main base of the coin. When I tested this texture in Maya, it looked great!

The next part was to do something about the edges, I tried cartoonising real coins, I tried creating my own designs, and everything just came out looking terribly in Maya. Eventually I found a way to work with the UVs and make a custom edge texture that fit nicely, but it was very small and had to be duplicated many times in order to actually appear clear rather than blurred.

Once my textures were sound, I put them together into one file and used the vertex snap tool to recreate an identical coin. I adjusted the UVs and molded the texture to match and created the bump and spec maps on crazy bump. I noticed that my coin was looking like it had some sharper edges so I used the insert edge loop tool to add some extra edges making the coin rounder. I also added a little bit of a glow affect to the coin to make it shine more.

Game Prop Traffic Cone Workflow

I went on a completely different track than I had intended to when I initially started this project. The props I built aren't what I had in mind originally. In each of the following blog posts (including this one) I will go through the workflow for each of my props to talk about the work that I did, problems I ran into, and to show images from start to finish.

The First Prop I want to discuss is the Traffic Cone. This is my most basic prop with the most basic texture. I found a texture online and altered it to slightly change the colors, get rid of the water marks, and bring more definition to the white lines. Once I finished my small adjustments, I used Cartoon.Pho.to to cartoonize my texture.

I then built my my traffic cone in Maya using a cylinder and a cube. First I did some research on the sizes of traffic cones to create one that was relatively the same dimensions. I used a small cylinder to shape the top of the cone and locked the vertices so it would create the cone shape. From there I created a cube and used the extrude tool to separate it into divisions. From there I got rid of the corner vertices of the cube to create the traffic cone base shape.

Once I had the shape and texture finished (or so I thought) I applied the texture to the object and ran into a lot of problems with the UVs. I had to go back and delete some faces inside the cone and move around some vertices. I also decided to play around with the cone texture to make it look a bit nicer. I tried adding in dark lines for definition at certain points on the cone and I tried adding decals to make the cone look more beat up, but neither of those worked well. What I did instead was use the sponge tool to adjust the saturation at different points in the texture which came out looking pretty nice. I also decided to move up the white lines making them a little less thick and I used the clone stamp tool to make it tilable along it's side. I also had the normal and spec maps created in crazy bump, but decided against the normal map because it looked odd on the cone. Instead, I made a unsaturated version of the orange background and added in little spots to make indents in the cone, causing it to look chipped at some points.


Once the UVs were fixed, I ran into a new problem when trying to place the triangle into unity, the texture file was getting screwed up. I had both Sam and Dale try help trouble shoot and we couldn't figure out how to fix it. The quads were getting converted to triangles and would blur the texture at certain points. I managed to fix the issue slightly by smoothing the cone and adding in an extra edge loop.

Below are images of what my texture went through, what my Maya file went through and my finished product.

Game Prop Week 2 Progress

This week I decided to change my ideas around a bit. After rethinking some of my prop ideas and references I decided to add more basic things suck as crates, traffic cones, garbage cans and other smaller things. I did a lot of work on my controller prop which I think I want to make a collectible in the game. I rethought the practicality of making a robot a prop for the game because in reality, it would be a character. So instead, I thought that building out robot parts instead to scatter throughout the level for a robot to upgrade himself with would be better. here are some of the renders of what I've been doing so far: