[WIP] A Gentleman's Chair

theokain

UPDATE:
finished model:
model

My goal is to make a low-poly (6 -10k) fantastical but believably functional chair that can be a central prop in a real-time engine.

For the style I chose baroque and art nouveau mix with a steampunky vibe.
For the story I imagined a wealthy middle aged late 18th early 19th century gentleman with a touch of eccentricity as the likeliest owner of an object like this.

The chair will have an animated cannon firing mechanism [push forward on the stick] and a recline function [pull back on the stick] just be careful not to mix them up...

I'm designing this chair with functionality in mind, the gears will move in the right direction etc, however I'm no engineer...  The question is how much can I get away with!

The other question is whether I should hand-paint or go with a realistic pbr workflow? I'm tending towards hand-painting at the moment.

The moodboard


And here's the concept sketch


So far I've put about 3 days work building up the model. The challenges have been getting all these elements to fit together nicely, so I've had to be creative with my bracket sytem, lol.

wip quad view




Hope everyone likes it and look forward to comments and critique!

Lukeman87

Cool concept! Your poly flow is looking solid thus far. The only recommendation I have is to add a little more geometry to the cylindrical objects just to round them out a bit more. Look forward to the finished piece!

theokain

@Lukeman87
Thanks! I've added a few more loops to round out the forms as suggested.

Always a struggle to hit a strict poly budget and I went over by about 600 tris, 10.6k total.

Just finished UV mapping and I've decided to overlap a few uv's and keep the overall texel distribution equal across the model... hopefully, I didn't make a mistake there! Arranging the UV's was a pain, I wanted to keep as many related islands together as possible and as straight as possible all in single 2k map...

uv's

theokain

I've completed the handpainting after many weeks. I attempted to capture the feeling of various materials and objects with low poly and hand painting the textures. Overall I used two 2048k maps for chair floor and objects and one 512k map for the background.



I'll post more W.I.P soon

model

theokain

Some of the WIP screenshots over time:

Getting the scale right in maya. 1 unit equals 5cm so the chair was roughly 180cm high and 60cm wide. I used 5cm units since maya places pivots in the center of newly created objects, and when grid snapping to the grid line it makes it a little easier to enlarge to even chunks of 10cm, which I prefer.

Modelling the Chair





















The wig was slightly remodeled later on as the poly strip side curls didn't work well, I replaced them with solids so I could paint in thickness.

theokain

My moodboard for coloring the chair... I wanted to implement greens for the background and brassy/wood/cast iron materials for the chair parts






Painting the Chair





























The overall motif was to combine butterfly patterns with gears, that's how I thought I could marry the art nouveau concept with steampunk... but the chair alone didn't seem enough to sell the story of the owner of the chair.

theokain

I wanted to ground the concept a little more than just a floating chair in space. A floor was needed and a few accessories to indicate a little more about the owner. After some research, I made a quick sketch of how it could look.



Creating the table accessories

































Overall, I learned a lot from this experience, mainly about preparation and nailing down things like the lighting before beginning the painting process. It's really hard to change the lighting for a hand painted model as opposed to a normal mapped, shader lit model... So to save time, I will spend more time in the prep phase for these projects!

Hope this was of interest to someone, and C&C always welcome! 

aclund3

Thank you very much for a bit of breakdown!  Fun project

Olingova

That wigg love the concept, really cool!

theokain

@Olingova @aclund3 Thanks for the interest in this project!