Blake Bauer 3D Modeling II & Animation: Creating a Low Poly Treasure Chest (Viking Edition)

The final product, coming in at 404 polys. The limit for the project was 500 polys.

The second project assigned was to create a low-poly treasure chest/loot box using the same methods that were utilized with the well.

The first step was to create the low poly model. I wanted to make something themed after Norse culture, so I started off by creating the bow of a longship and going from there. I thought it might serve as decoration for the main object, which is the chest itself.

the main body, which looks like a sad pelican now that I think about it

For handles, I was originally going to go for simple, geometric bars, but then I remembered that longships usually had dragons decorating their bows, so I set out to make that the bars/decorations.

The first pass for the dragon looked like that one snake in Grimm Adventures of Billy and Mandy:

while Norse longships had something like this:

So, after a little thought and tweaking I ended up with this:

I'd add in a tongue, but I want to keep it all low-poly

This is the final low poly model:

Now comes the fun part, which is the creation of the high-poly models. Unlike the well, I actually split the whole model in half. I figured that reconnecting the finished bits through the symmetry options would make things a whole lot easier. In the end, I was right.

I started with the more detailed part of the chest, which was the dragon:

my first attempt, which was just plain ugly

my second attempt, which was much, much better

My second step was getting the front of the "Ship" textured:

I tried making a norse pattern through the sculpting tool.

The top was just an elevated plain. The sides I used deformed cubes to recreate the boards.

Then came the chest:

the top slab was divided in half to create a symmetrical pattern

the chest was much simpler

My high poly modeling was not very organized...

so my laptop wouldn't explode, these were the only high poly models I made for the baking

...but it worked!

UV mapping was a hassle, but I eventually got it right.

In another file I created a pattern for the chest (similar to the rope for the well) that I edited into the bump map on a program called Paint.NET

With that out of the way came the baking:

as well as the texture maps, which I made in Paint. NET:

diffuse map

Spec map

I was going to use an ambient occlusion map, but for whatever reason the shading for that map refuses to work whenever I render it. The whole model "glows" even when there is no light shining on it. It might be because my version of Maya rendered it very brightly: