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.