Prop model

I decided to make the prop a sort of candleholder, inspired by one of the concept drawings I made for my game for AND218

(the candleholders on the bottom drawing)

I made a few sketches exploring ideas for it, and ended up choosing the left one. I liked the way the stick curved on it.

For the prop, I chose to do the low-to-high method, so I had to model a lowpoly version, and a highpoly.

This is the lowpoly

When I showed it to Mr Morris, he noticed I had n-gons on all the circles (The base of the stick, the end of the cut-off branch, the candle base and the wick), so I had to fix those, but otherwise I was good to move on to the next part.

This is the first version of the highpoly

It’s just a smoother version of the lowpoly, with some changes to the branch and circle, that happened while I was messing with the model in sculpting mode.

I didn’t know what we need to exactly do yet, because this was while we were on Christmas vacation, and we weren’t given the lecture on this step yet. So, I looked up different methods of texturing models.

For the lowpoly, I tried texture painting. There’s not much to say about it, it was pretty straight forward. I used this video as a guide.

This is the final result.

For the highpoly, I wanted to look into procedurally generated materials. I knew they exist, but I knew nothing on how to make them. For the wood part, I watched this video, explaining step by step how to make the material.

For the candle wax, I watched this video.

And for the wick, I just used the default material, changed the hue to black, and adjusted the roughness.

This is the final result

The two textured versions turned out to be completely unnecessary for the method we were supposed to use for the prop model, but because of this I learned how to change materials of only selected objects, which I would need later on. I also enjoyed making the procedurally generated materials, and I’d like to explore this side of Blender more in the future, because I’ve seen other people do beautiful work with it.

After showing all of this to Mr Morris, he explained my highpoly is wrong, and needs much more details, and that we would add materials using substance painter. After he gave the lecture on normal maps (and other types of maps), and how they’re used, I understood what I need to do with the highpoly for its maps to be projected correctly onto the lowpoly.

I tried using the old version of the highpoly, but very quickly realized that with the amount of problems I’ll have to fix, it would be easier to just start over. So, I duplicated the lowpoly version, subdivided it, and sculpted details.

This is what I’ve come up with.

The last step I needed to do before moving to Substance Painter 3D, is to assign different materials to the different parts of the prop (wood, candle, wick). This process was very easy after what I did before with the old versions.

This is how the model looked after that, I used different colors for me to tell where each one is. I know they won’t show up in the final version.

I moved to Substance Painter after that, and the process was very straight forward. Mr Morris had already showed us how to bake maps from a highpoly model onto a lowpoly, so after that all I needed to do is choose the materials. The candle and the wick were easy, they’re the Wax and Charcoal Smart Materials that come with substance painter. I had more options for the wood, but I ended up choosing Wood Walnut. I experimented with adding an overlay of Carved Wood, a material I found on the community assets, but it didn’t look right on my model, so I scrapped that idea.

This is the final model with all materials.

I think the candle is most successful at showcasing the maps from the highpoly. If I were to do this again, I would make the details in the highpoly much more exaggerated, so they show up better on the lowpoly.

I didn’t get feedback from Mr Morris yet, so this final version can still change.