Tree House UV Mapping

Ryan has a lot of UV mapping and texturing to do this term and I'm worried he may be overwhelmed with his workload, we were speaking to Dan and we agreed it would be a good idea if I learn how to do some basic UV mapping to help take some of the pressure off of him.


As it is my first time UV mapping I was a little unsure about how well I would do as it has always seemed like a complicated and technical role, but Ryan showed me the basics so I have enough knowledge to get started with the work. i tried UV mapping in the more accurate way where you make a projection and cut the UV edges to unfold them in the Texture Editor, but I found it too difficult crashing straight in doing so many new and complex tasks, so Ryan showed me a slightly easier method called Automatic Mapping which unwraps and creates UV maps for the object automatically.


I took on the role of UV mapping the interior of the treehouse, I had to create the UVs for each of the wooden planks which was easy enough, but because there are so many planks it has taken a very long time to do.


After I made the UVs for each plank I assigned a Lambert material with a black and white checker shader assigned to it, this is so you can see if the UVs are working correctly, if the checker pattern looks stretched or distorted then that means any textures that are applied to the object will also appear stretched and distorted, this is important because any problems like this have to be fixed before the UV maps are turned into a snapshot for texturing.

In the UV texture editor theres a useful setting that allows you to be able to see the UV edges which also appears in the perspective or orthographic view that you are using.

This screenshot shows the treehouse including the roof fully UV mapped and ready to be textured, it took a while to finish and I have to admit is incredibly boring and not something I particularly like to do, but as long as it's saved Ryan hours of work then I'm happy to have helped.

Final Xylophone

From my previous post the Xylophone has completely changed. I am really pleased with the way this has turned out. It looks just the way i drew it. To create the head and tail i used the create poly tool and drew the very rough shapes. They did not look to great at first and i had to add more vertexes so that i could make the shape nice and smooth.
When modelling the tail, i had a happy accident happen, where the tail goes near the middle you may notice a slight wave in the tail. I never meant to do that but once i saw it i thought it looked really good and made sure i made it look the same on the other side.
Where i was going to have the screws inside the drill holes of the bar, i thought it would be safer if i placed a little round plastic cover which is child friendly.

Xylophone

When making a idiophone ( the single bar ) i had to make sure that there was two holes so that the screw could then be placed later on. With one bar make i duplicated it and make each one smaller, for higher and lower pitch.
The mallet was rather simple i just used a sphere and cylinder and place them together. I just need to attach them together for them to become one object.

Here is what the Xylophone is roughly looking like. I could use this but i want to create the fish one like i designed a while ago as it has a lot more character. So i now just need to model the fish head and tail and place them on either end.

Final Tower of hanoi

This is the finished version. Now that everything is placed together it actually looks pretty good. I think using shaders for this toy will look pretty realistic, as we could have some reflections to show that the toy is plastic.

The tower of hanoi

Modelling the Tower of Hanoi was one of the easiest props i have made this year, nice easy and simple to make. I used a torus to create the rings which goes around the shape and duplicated that and just made them bigger.
For the base all i needed to do was use a cube and flatten it a little and used the bevel tool to soften the ages. For the pool i used a poly cylinder and used the scale tool wider the bottom and thin the top. Place them together and you have your toy.

Final House

Here is the final version of the house. From the previous post, there has been a few changes. I added the tiles like i said i would which i really think brings the house out, if the tiles had just been textured on as a plane surface, i think the house would have looked rather dull. I just used a plane and shaped that into a tile an duplicated that to complete the roof. I also made the smaller roofs a little more realistic by extruding the middle part in to form a triangle. I nearly forgot to put in a drain pipe for the waste until Ryan said about that, and i also added in a mat by the door. They are only small things, but they are the things which can really make props stand out.

House Modelling

As Mike said about a month or so ago about modeling a house i thought it was now time that i did that. We only need the back of the house as that is the only part that you would be seeing so there is no need to make the house higher poly or even waste time in modeling the other sides as it will not be seen. So i have taken a look into west end American homes because they visually look more interesting to what we have here in England and they normally have a big garden which can have a tree house as that is something which is not popular here in the U.K.

So to the left are some images from the net to help me model the house. I started with a cube and started to add edge loops where i wanted to place the windows. I also deleted a couple of faces so that there could be a small porch which will be supported by stone poll.
Here i started to model the door and then i need to make another window next to the door which will be the kitchen window. The roof was easily done by using the extrude tool, and making more edge loops to make the windows. From here i need to make the roof tiles as i think they will look nice if they are modeled separately and lined up across the roof.

Finished Heart Cushions

Here i decided to make two heart cushions in the end, one for Summer and one for Pandy. Pandy has the smaller one as he is only small himself. You can not see from this render but Summers cushion does have the indent to it. I think they will liven the tree house more as everything else seems a little to square.

Heart Cushions

Modelling the heart cushions went a lot smoother as to what i thought it might. I was a little unsure on how to start modelling. So i started in my usual way which never seems to fail. With a plane and then work my way from there. I made the rough shape and then extruded it so that the heart was thicker, from there i added 4 edge loops so that i could then begin to make the flat shape into a curves.
Here you can see where i am moving the vertexes to start creating the curve shape to which a cushion should have.
With the top and bottom of the heart curved, i then needed to curve around the edge of the cushion to softer everything. I mainly just needed to move to middle vertexes outwards.
Here you can now see that the flat shape it once was has now changed into a soft cushion. The only thing wrong now is that i thought it never really looked like Summer has sit on it before, as there would be an indent to show weight from her body.
I have been experimenting with the vertexes to try and suggest that summer does sit on the heart cushion, so now you can see a slight indent to where she would have been placed. This may not really be seen in the animation very well but it is something that i know has been done. It is sometimes little things like this that can make an animation that extra bit special.

Finished Rocking Horse

As i had previously removed all the lines from the rocking horse i now had nothing to go to make it smooth round the edge. I was trying to figure this out for a while but was just clueless so i asked Karl if he may know of any way to try and fix the problem as i know he is fairly good at using the smooth tool. Karl added edges to the shape again as there were no lines for the smooth tool to work. The edges had to be created from the previous existing vertexes which from there could then be smoothed.


Here is the finished rocking horse. I am really glad that Karl was able to help me fix the problem i was having and i now know not to delete any lines until the model is complete and then i can go ahead and do that. Now the rocking horse looks to a much higher standard and still looks as though it would have been made by her dad which i think could be really nice once Ryan gets to texture it.

Rocking Horse

When modelling the rocking horse i thought it would be best to start off with the base, starting off nice and easy. To the left hand side you can see an image of a rocking horse which i thought was the perfect shape to class off as Summers dad making the horse for her.
With other models i have created i started off with a plane, but i was having a few problems as i had put in way to many edge loops and when trying move the vertexes to make the shape, they were starting to fall onto of one another and it started to become very messy.
Here is how this was working out, as you can see everything is starting to become messy around the horses mouth.
So with that i started over and made one with less edge loops, even though i had less i was still having difficulty. So i then had to start moving every single vertex which was taking quite some time to do but never the less the form was taking to shape.
You can now see that i did manage to create the horse, but there was so many lines that i thought it would be best to delete them so that the horse only have a few faces to him.
Here is now the horse came out. I was rather pleased that i managed to get the shape considering the problems i was having. The only thing about the horse now is that it is not very smooth, and looks slightly dangerous. At first i thought this might be a good idea as it looks rough like it has been hand made, but i also thought that is was a little messy. So i now intend on going round the shape and smooth it off, which can also seem like the father would have used sandpaper to give it that effect.

Finished Gardening Tools

As you can see the extruding the fork has created quite an interesting shape, i did try this with the spade so that it could be a more consistent design but this did not work out well.

Gardening Tools

Creating the gardening tools was slightly harder than what i thought. When modelling the spade i had the same type of problem i had when making the slide, i could not seem to get the curve of the spade quite right. I was also a little unsure on on the shape of the spade.
I had to think about the thickness for the spade as the gardening tools are plastic, so they would be thicker than what a metal spade would be.

Here i played with the edge of the handle as i thought it would be nice to have them colour coded, so i just extruded the handle just a little to also make the edge seem smoother.

To create the fork i used a cube and turned that into a rectangle, i then created five edge loops so that i could then select three faces and extrude them down to make the points of the fork.
As the fork looked a little boring i thought it would be interesting to extrude part of the fork inwards which would make the fork tool more useful if when in use. So i created edge loops to do this. I also curved off the points of the folk so that they would be safer.

Here are all the faces selected so that i can just extrude them inwards.