For our tripe A asset assignment, I desied to make a toy carousel. I chose this as corosels are mostly sametical so I could do a lot of duplicating, but it still has a lot of small detales and separent parts that would make it interesting.
I chose this carousel as it had a nice diversity of matirales and many refrances photos from different angles. I also wanted to try making a reflective surface which is carousel has doted around.
Before starting, I decided to make a template for the main body of the carousel, as all the refrances where at an agle. I then used meany cylinders and esxrutions to make the basic shape. I then realied, as the deign around the bottom is repeated four times, it would be hard to keep them all identical if i did them separately. To solve this I cut a quarter of and made the design once, then duplicated and rotated it to comple the base. To make the flowers and the mirror, I used the quad draw tool to make the basic shapes, then duplicated to make everything smetical. I also tried to keep everything very simple, as then I could used the non smoothed version of the high poly as the low poly. I did have to flatten ou the mirrors on the top so that they use less polys, and I also delated edge loops here and there to keep the count low.
High Poly Modelling
Once I'ed finished the mesh for the high poly carousel, I worked on making the horse. To lessen the work loud, I desided to just make one horse, and then make multiple defuse maps for the different colours. I first, I thought it would be better if I try to make the whole horse out of one mesh. That way it will be easier to make the low poly, as I woden't have to wory about combining things after. However, this brought up many complications as making sure the edge flow worked all the way around way very hard. As I was making most of the components separately, I had to keep adding egde loops in places to make sure I could combined them. This became confusing and even made the topology of the horse really bad. In the end, I chose to start again from an earlier stage and made sure to make everything separately. Again, I made the mesh ferly simple and used the un-smoothed version for the low poly. I also removed the smaller details as they would be part of the normal map.
To create the finer textures like the leather and fabric, I used some alphas in ZBrush. I also used the spiel brush to make the spiels on the mirror, and the rake tool to make the hair on the horse. I also wanted to put wood paneling onto the bottom part of the carousel, but I couldn't get it to look right.
Finished High Poly
Quixel
Once I had finished the high poly and low poly models, I added smart materials in Quixel. I didn't remember how Quixel worked, so I used the sadle of the horse as a test. I remembered that every different marital needed a different color, but by doing this I also learnt that if I want something of the same marital to be a different color, it would need a different ID colour. I also exspremented with the different matirales to see what would work well.
I used what I'd learnt in the test to make the real maps for my model. I tried to get as much as I could onto one UV Map, but as there was so many different components with different matirales, I desided to split the carousel into three parts and have one for the horse. I exported the seprent parts in high and low poly so that I could use XNormal to make the normal maps. I aplayed the maps and colour IDs to the low poly models in Maya to make sure everything was aliened properly. I continued to tweek it and move things around until I was happy with it.
I then put everything into Quixel. I used the reference images to help me chose the right matirales. I desided to use mostly plastics as it was sapost to be a toy. I used the paint marital for most of the colours as it looks hand painted, and then I used brass for the gold bits. I was going to use gold but that looked too shiny, and other metals woden't look gold eanouth when I changed its colour. I then used a sliver for all the mirrors, as that was the most refletive matiral, and a wood texure for the base. I would perfure to use a plastic as thats that the orinonal is made from, but as I coden't get the wood panaling on using nomals, I wanted the base to at lest resemble wood. The one matiral I codent get to look right was the glass. There was glass matirlas available but they didn't have the translucency that I needed. The biggest problem I found was that the normals for the mirrors on the top didn't line up properly. This may be because I had to move it around when making the low poly, so they may be in slightly different positions in the low then the high. I also over lapped the UVs of the mirror which may have also affected this.
Unreal
I haven't used Unreal before, but it was similer to making seances in Unity so I didn't find it too hard. I used the assets already in Unreal to make a small room to display the carousel in. I also made it sunset as the pinky colours suited the childlike carousel. I found a glass marital in the unreal assests so I used that for my light bulbs and put spot lights into them. I also added lights to the top ring to reflect the reference image. I also got the carosel to spin by adding a rotating tab to the middle part and horses.
Over all I really liked what I've produced. I feel, even though some of the matirales do look different from the reference, the overall effect is very strong. Doing this has help me to learn more efficient ways to make low poly models look to a higher slandered. Its also hepled me think more criticaly about diffrent matirales and what makes them different.
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