Game Texture Development - Crate Modelling

Introducing us to the world of texturing for games, we were asked to texture a storage crate. As I have had some experience with 3D modelling and texturing, I decided to attempt something a bit more challenging than a wooden crate.

My model will be a Sci-Fi storage crate that may be used for health packs or ammo crates, in a game with a futuristic setting. To start this process I used the create polygon primitive tool in Maya2016 to produce a cube. The polygon primitive tool allows you to create a number of simple shapes that have predefined values, these can then easily be manipulated in the channel box.





Once the cube was created I realized that I should check my unit settings in preferences. The unit of measurement determines at what scale the primitive is created. For this project I will be using meters because a one meter crate is a nice scale to work with, when importing assets into a game engine such as Unreal 4. Realizing that my unit of measurement was set to centimeters, I changes it to meters. The cube was then deleted and recreated using the primitives tool. I could have scaled the cube up and snapped the vertices to the grid, but this method aids my workflow.


Once the unit was set to meters, the grid automatically reflects the selected unit. I always like my models to be as accurate as possible, with this in mind I altered the grid settings so that there were ten subdivisions in the grid for every unit. These preferences are remembered for each new project that you begin, meaning that you should not have to change this every time. From these grid settings I now know that every subdivision is 10cm.




Deleting five faces from the cube I was left with a plane and no subdivisions in the geometry. I used a cube because this would mean that the pivot point is at the point of origin, speeding my workflow further. Extruding the plane and scaling down allowed me to create the base geometry that I needed. This also created a problem, as the extrusion created 5 new faces. The problem is easily resolved by selecting the extra face and deleting it. Extruding the center face and moving it inwards gave the asset some shape but I wanted the silhouette of the asset to be slightly more complex than this. In order to complete my task I used the multi cut tool in order to split the geometry at the desired points, the new vertices where then snapped into place by holding the V key whilst using the move tool. I then extruded the corners of the asset and pulled them in the positive Z axis, defining the shape a little further.

Once the one side of the crate was completed I needed to create some UV's for the object. UV's are the 2D representation of a 3D object, you could think of it as a box net. Creating the UV's at this stage of the modelling process can speed up your workflow and help with the optimization of the asset. This is because all sides of the object will share the same UV space, thus texturing them all at the same time and reducing the need for a larger resolution texture file.

In order to create the UV's I switched to the front orthographic view in Maya, selected the object and used the create from camera option in the UV menu set. This created the UV's from the angle of the camera that you are using. Once this is completed the UV's then need to be unfolded, for this I use the smooth UV tool. The tool allows you to unfold and relax individual UV's but I find that using it on an entire UV shell gives you much less distortion in your UV's than the unfold tool itself does.

At this stage I wanted to save the file, in the event that the software crashed or became corrupted. When saving your scenes or any other files for your project you should make sure that you set up a project hierarchy. This is done by going to the file menu and selecting project window. Here you can name your project and Maya will create all of the necessary folders for you.

Maya is a very intelligent piece of software and will grab your files from the correct folders and also save to the correct folders in the hierarchy. This is another way to speed up your workflow, meaning that you are not searching through your folders to find that pesky project or texture file.

With my project saved I then went on the create the other 5 sides of the create. This involved duplicating the object an rotating it in 90 degree increments using the channel box. Once the crate was completed, the object then needed to be combined. This is done using the combine tool in the mesh menu, or using the shift right-click shortcuts. It does not stop there. Now that the asset is one object the vertices can be stitched together, using the merge tool in the edit mesh menu.



And there we have it, an asset that is ready to be textured. I enjoyed this little exercise, as it allowed me to refresh my memory on some of the tools that hide away in Maya2016. 3D modelling can be such an enjoyable experience once you learn how the software works. I will continue on with the texturing process in another post and hopefully refresh my memory with some fun texturing methods. Thanks for reading and goodnight......