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.