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.