Rocks, Rocks and more rocks.

 Week 7

So this week was mainly focused on a stylized rock project I got in game production. The aim of this project was to create a stylized rock that has been design with a purpose and to fit loosely with the concepts provided to help with artistic direction. The rock is to be created physically first and then translated into a functioning game asset, within set specifications of 600 tris and 2 512x512 texture maps one for diffuse on the rock and one for an alpha map if needed.

As I wasn’t provided with reference and concepts to work from I began by creating a mood board to help come up with some basic shapes for my rock design. I looked at general rock shapes I liked, crystals and there colours and examples of drawings on rocks. I then created some blocked out shapes for silhouettes to begin designing my rock, before developing a design and experimenting with colours. Once I had my design I began to model it in 3ds max, which I decided on a rock and crystals to symbolize Life, and family.

Generally I feel that this project went pretty well and I already feel that I have improved on some things, such as my time management which for this project and even though there still not amazing I still feel my skills and knowledge has improved a lot on Photoshop and creating my own textures. I’m kind of happy with my unwrap and Uv map, I feel that I spent are fair amount of time on them trying to get them easily readable and tidy, as well as making sure there would be no major smearing when my texture was applied, as I had to make the decision to have my sides separate to prevent smearing. I was pretty comfortable concepting my own designs and working form them and I think creating a physical model really helped understand how to build it in max.

Some ways in which I think I could improve my work would be to practice my Photoshop/texturing skills a lot more as I’m still not very skilled and feel my end model still lacks some on the texture side. If I had more time I think that I’d go back and forth between Photoshop and 3ds max to check my textures a lot more. One thing I noticed was there were still a fair few faces that could do with the smoothing groups being changed on the curved edges, so I would possibly change that next time. One last thing I think I would change would be to play around with some more verts to give a little more dynamic to my rock.

Wire frame shots of my finished stylized rock

 Beauty shots of my finished stylized rock.

 

Here is my Uv template and Texture Map.