3D WIP Journal: Low-Poly Victorian Tea Set

EJtheArtist

Making a silver tea set for Ever, Jane. Just blocking out some shapes and forms right now. Should be super fun to make If you've any ideas along the way, please post! 

ref:


First Blockout: (super rough, but they always are Just getting the general proportions...



First thing I'm tackling next are the feet. I'm considering using an alpha channel.. I'll let you know how it goes!

-EJ

And a silly thing I did to figure out topology for a serving spoon... Because who wants to think of spoon topology for hours when they have a whole tea set to make :pleased: Sharpie markers are handy.

EJtheArtist

So far so good. I'm actually really surprised and pleased at the results!! With just a little handpainting in photoshop and some smart UVs.. I came up with this look:


Looks totally awful up close, but luckily they won't get that close With a normal map and a little tightening up... should do well in game. Best part is, it only took about 45 minutes!

EJtheArtist

"Sugar cubes would not be invented until 1843 – if people wanted sugar for tea, they had to first break it into irregular lumps with special tools called “sugar nippers,” from which practices comes the traditional question “One lump or two?"

see article, quite interesting. Basically, if you took sugar in your tea, you were in support of slavery.

EJtheArtist

Its coming along, fairly jumbled, but on its way. My goal is to use the same texture for all of the pieces. So far that's working. Next is to make the handles and the spouts, combine everything to one texture/material, then start polishing for consistency.  See any red flags?

Steve Schulze

I quite like the angular style you've got going on these pieces.

Disregarding the spouts and handles, I think maybe the tea chest texture stands out as being a little too detailed when compared to the simplicity of the tea set. I'd be inclined to go for a more hand painted wood grain. 

The detail on the cups looks like it might be a smidgen too contrasty against the off-white of the clear glaze.

Otherwise I think it's mostly just a question of finishing off the model details of the tea set  and continuing polishing up the textures. 

EJtheArtist

So here's where I left it for today. I've got the meshes water tight, the uvs all on one map, and combined the detail textures too. My next step is to get that material looking awesome in marmoset/unity4, then polish off the textures. yay! almost done!

EJtheArtist

Here's where I left it today. I kind of got tunnel vision on adjusting the texture maps. I'm a little stuck in that i'm not sure what else I can do to improve them. My choices are to keep improving it for unity 4 using the speculator workflow... which I would like it to look nicer for the game... and/or switch to improving this for my portfolio, in which case, I'd want more filigree details. smoother curves, and grab PBR in unity 5 or unreal. There are some other really nice details that I would love to include. Plus the filigree pieces don't look like they are made of the same material as the plain silver.

EJtheArtist

maybe this is a little bit better?? I got rid of the drastic color variation in the diffuse.