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.