BA3 - Progression of my final folly in Maya

As I write this, I have now finished my model! The overall build didn't take very long, and it was mainly the textures which took the largest bulk of my time. I do have a lot of progression shots which show how I made my model, however. With the knowledge I gained from creating my studies, the shapes of my folly seemed a lot simpler in comparison, and I wanted to try and keep everything very low-poly.

Primitives were the way to go when it came to my final, I mainly used the cylinder, for the roof and original base. I eventually split the top half from the bottom in order to create an additional texture map. (The process itself is fairly visable from the images I have provided, however I will still add some additional information).

Now that my initial final had been structured, I was able to UV wrap. Although not shown here (but below in the final textures), I added an additional UV map which was for the planks of wood shown on top of the white panels. My reasoning for this being that the original texture part was way too small for them.

In order for my windmill sails to become transparent I used an alpha map, to begin with I had a lot of troubles with it actually working correctly. However, I then found out that the alpha channel needed to be applied to diffuse file.

As much as I liked the idea of adding a water wheel, and did some in depth research into how waterwheels worked; I feel like it didn't fit within the scene. The wall wouldn't make sense to have a bolt coming out of it, so I decided to go against adding it. My main concern was the overall structure, and I didn't want it to damage the overall aesthetic. This change wasn't because of time pressure, but because I had serious doubts of it looking visually appealling in 3D.

Another issue I had with the model itself is where whole pieces would appear transparent, even though all the files seemed correct. I believed this to be zFighting, so I separated some pieces and gave them their own material. This seemed to work, although the one draw back is I'm left with a lot of seperate parts which aren't combined.

All I needed to do after this was polish the textures and add the additional maps, which can be seen here!

And of course the ground! Although not part of the main build, I still wanted to include it. I feel like it really solidifies the structure as something which could appear in game with a solid foundation beneath. I would definitely consider reworking it after the deadline has finished, maybe add a little lampost too! I have also added my alpha channel used within the sails to make the edges completely transparent.

To create the specular and normal maps, I used PixPlant. I didn't want all of them to have a high intensity because I felt it wasn't needed as much as the door/stone wall, which needed to look like it was going outwards.

Next is the specular maps, which I imported from PixPlant and then slightly edited in Photoshop. Most due to parts of my model being made from metal, like the bars on the door and the bolts in the middle of the windmill blades.

#ba3