Blake Bauer 3D Modeling II & Animation: Modeling Out a Low-Poly Well

For my first project in 3d Modeling II, I decided to follow along to a tutorial on how to model and texture a well. This was so I could practice making buildings, as that aligns with my interests.

Over time, I realized that to make a well, I also need to sacrifice small bits and pieces of my soul.

So here is how I designed the Bottomless Well of Torment.

I started like any other model: with simple geometry. There was a cylinder for the well itself, which was hollowed out in the middle. Cylinders were also used for the trees that held up the roof, which, in order to achieve their organic shape, were divided with edge loops, followed by me moving the vertices to form simple roots and broken branches. The roof was designed as a simple, deformed cube.

The ground itself started out as a NURB curve, which was then filled and extruded.

In the end of the initial modeling, I had this:

That was the easy part.

In order to create texture, I needed to create bump maps. To do so, the Well demanded its first sacrifice through the creation of a high poly counterpart to its low-poly form.

This was done through copying and subdividing the original models.

For the well and the ground that surrounded it, I extruded each face unconnected, creating "bricks" that covered the surfaces. From there was a long process of deforming every brick individually through their vertices. Then I subdivided and used the sculpting tool to create more texture.

Note the black spots. I moved the project over to my laptop, which only has Maya 2016. I assume this is a result of transferring the file to a previous version.

All those subdivisions

Since this high-poly model was just going to be used for the bump mapping, I didn't worry too much about mistakes or errors in the geometry. Any mistake can be fixed in photoshop once the map is exported.

The trees were simpler to do. I just had to subdivide them and use the sculpting tool.

After the sculpting was done, I had this:

Each brick was individually sculpted as a separate object

After the trees and well were done came another sacrifice. The Well demanded a roof, one that could be made through multiple convoluted means.

The tutorial videos went through three before settling on one. I, helpless, followed them all.

The first attempt had a system similar to the well take place: where each face was individually extruded and sculpted. This was unsatisfactory.

The second attempt was similar, except that each face was moved and "folded" on top of one another. This process was the most painful to do, but did create a slightly better texture, though it was very ugly when viewed from the side.

the sides: note the ugliness

The third and final method was to simply model out each tile with a cube. It was successful. The tiles that connected both sides of the roof were bent with a deformer.

After the roof, the trees, and the well was fully textured, a quick bucket (cylinder) and rope (spiral that was extruded) were made. Supports under the roof were also made that were deformed into triangles.

UV maps were then put together.

organizing this mess took time

Which ended with a texture low-poly model ready to be baked!

It's good to ensure that the numbers are about the same size for every model.

the final UV layout for the low-poly model

Then came baking. This was a lengthy process of selecting the low and high poly models simultaneously and then waiting for them to bake.

This took a while (about an hour or so).

After that was finished, a bump map was created!

the bump map for the roof

Which I combined into one file:

the final product at the end

With some phot manipulation magic, I made the dffuse map from the UV layout, bump map, and the various textures provided to me by the tutorial (as well as a few, like the moss, from google)