For a complete change of pace, I decided to move on from the Elder Scrolls franchise and move over to another similar game, "Fallout: New Vegas" [2009, Obsidian Studios, Video Game]. With a new game, comes new challenges and after the previous models I was confident enough to make the jump to a different art style.
The IDEA
Fallout: New Vegas, in comparison to skyrim, takes place in a post apocalyptic Las Vegas in a kind of future according to the 1950's kind of way. Laser guns, Nuclear powered cars and the such like. As you may expect these models are rather intricate and did not leave much room for interpretation so just like with skyrim, I looked to the smaller models which were maybe not given as much love as they would have liked. This was a more challenging endeavour as fallout appears to have had more time spent on asset creation and instead i just chose one of the more simple objects I could find, A 5mm Ammo Box. I chose this as the shape looked interesting to recreate and I could maybe add to it a little.
With the ingame pictures you can see how strange the top of the box looks, one of the main features that drew me to the box, it looks quite challenging to model but with the skills I have from completing the other models, I was confident that I could create the same design.
The Design(s)
With the Ammo box, there were a lot of lines I wanted to keep, for example the entirety of the top of the box but I decided to change it up a bit. Instead of making an ammo box to hold ammunition, I thought up the idea of maybe making an ammo box to hold an assortment of things, like an ammo chest. You can see that in the designs I flat out removed the wrap arounds on all four sides of the lid for a more classic box like lid. Also I removed the intricate hinging on the box in favour for my own design i made inspired by door hinges and the like.
Modelling the Idea
The Box was simple but a little finicky towards the end with the creation of the hinges, but this was nobody's fault but my own for creating them on the fly. The Box is a creation of 4 separate objects. The base, The Lid and the Two Hinges
I started with the lid so I could get, what was at the time, the most difficult part done fist. Just like with the gladius i made use of length, width and depth segments so I could get internal lines I could move to mimic the lines seen in the designs. Once the lines were in place i extruded the lines to the desired height. As for the slants leading up to the raised edges, I brought the edges up to the same level. There are probably more simple way to go about doing that but was the way that felt more intuitive to me at the time. Next up came the base of the box which was nothing more than creating two boxes of desired size and then using the boolean object to cut the smaller from the larger to make a hollow box. I wish I could make this sound more tricky but that is all there was to it. Lastly came the hinges. These were made by me when I decided that instead of having a lift off lid, it should be hinged so I quickly created something that resembled a hinge. The hinge consists of two elongated cuboids, which would act as the panels that connect to the box, and a cylinder with a smaller cylinder booleaned out of it to make it hollow. For a quick solution to a small problem, I am quite pleased with the outcome.
The texturing of this object did not go anywhere near as well as i had hoped. I could not find a texture in the Iray Library that looked right for the model but I think this may be due to the strange lighting engine Autodesk uses. In the full render the textures look stripey on the brass hinges, something that no amount of tweaking the UVW map could fix which sucked. Also the metals would either be too light or too dark with no nice midway point. I wanted to use a brushed steel texture however it did not play nice with the lid with stretch marks all over the inclines. This was not good enough, so has to settle on a cast metal texture with a modified colour so that it was not too light. In Hindsight I could have textured it myself however I do not think that would have looked as good due the rest of the object and the others created utilised the Iray Library which contains very high quality textures. Own made textures would have just looked out of place and would have made the object look worse that it did to begin with.
The Final Product and Final Thoughts
The Ammo Box is bar far my least favourite model due to the texturing difficulties and the awkward lighting engine. The model itself is functionally fine. It looks correct and looks functional, its just the textures that let the object down. luckily I have more than this model to look back on later and I can use this to see that it never always goes perfectly all the time. Sometimes no matter how much time to put into something, it will not look any better than when you started.