If you saw my last blog post, you may have noticed there were a few props that went along with my interaction system. As it turns out, these were 3D models that I made myself using Blender. I've been really excited about learning this tool for a long time, so I thought I'd take a minute to look at the first few pieces that I made. This isn't going to be a super in-depth art review of my work, but rather just talking about the experience of making the props and looking at what I've learned.
The Purpose
In all honesty, learning how to use Blender was long overdue. While I will always prefer creating level blockouts directly in engine, I know that a lot of companies prefer that level designers have good knowledge of an official 3D modeling tool, and I totally understand why. Not only does it allow you to do your work, but it teaches you about the most commonly used tools and fundamentals among game artists. I felt that in order to be more effective as a game designer and team member, it was necessary for me to have this knowledge and be prepared to use it. And since Maya can be quite costly without a student plan, Blender seemed like the perfect tool.
The Props
Even though I have a lot of experience modeling with Unity ProBuilder, I decided to go simple with my props to start, and just focus on what I needed for my current interactables. That said, I did try to employ some polish tricks that helped me learn the basics, and always do something new with each model.
The Door
As was showed in the interaction system, I had a door that you could open and close, so I figured that was the easiest place to start. At first, it seems like this would be pretty simple; just get a cube and model both sides of it to be the same as the other. But with a simple trick, we can actually make it even easier. Instead of using that first method, I cut the cube in half and added the Mirror Modifier to the mesh. This way, the back of the door always looks exactly the same as the front. Afterwards, it was just a matter of adding in the details.
But afterwards, we started on the doorknob, which I decided to make a bit more detailed with some beveling of edges and setting up some smooth shading. Probably what I'm most proud of with this is the keyhole. To get this set up, I modeled out the shape of the hole and made it a child of the knob. Lastly, I added a Boolean Modifier to indent the hole directly into the mesh.
And lastly, there was the shading and texturing. The knob was a simple gold color with an increase to its metallic look, and then the keyhole was just solid black. As for the door itself, I found some nice free textures, roughness images, and normals on Poliigon.com that I was able to apply to get a nice wood finish. And there you have it; a pretty nice looking door!
The Button
Another actor I set up was a button you could press to open a sliding door, and for that, I went even simpler than the door. After modeling out the cube base and the actual button part, I decided to do one extra thing, which was create my own texture to apply. The reference image I chose had a base for the button that was an alternation of yellow and black lines, which didn't seem too hard to make, so I hopped into Illustrator and did just that. As for applying the texture to the button, this is where I got to play with UV maps. I definitely don't think I did a perfect job, as the sides don't completely line up. But for the simple practices of what I wanted to do, I think it went pretty well.
The Carrot
This is actually for something that wasn't in my last post, but since then, I've built an actor for pulling a plant out of the ground, and for that, I of course need a plant. I thought a carrot would be simple enough, but still present a challenge. That came more in the form of setting up the colors. Using a color ramp on the Z-axis, I managed to set up a gradient effect on different parts of the carrot, first for the body, and then for the leaves. Unfortunately, I couldn't get that gradient to come over to Unreal, but I want to revisit it when I can and see what the problem is. And lastly, there were the UVs for this mesh. Definitely more complicated than the button, but through the use of seams, I was able to unwrap the faces in a way that allowed for my simple coloring. Definitely looking forward to using those again if I need to.
Conclusions
Like I said, my goal wasn't to make any super polished pieces, but rather to use each one to teach me new techniques and fundamentals of Blender, and I think I did that pretty well. In just 3 models, I learned how to create modifiers, organize UV maps, and create my own materials with visual scripting. At least for now, I plan to use the tool for more of this prop work, and stick to in-engine level design for blockouts, but knowing that I have these fundamentals and can add Blender to my resume is a HUGE win.
I also want to give a big shout-out to The Blender Guru on YouTube. His videos have been so helpful during all of this, and will likely continue to be. Hopefully there will be more props I can make with this new project, so be on the lookout. Exciting things happening!
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