An Amateur’s 3D Creation Tutorial
Hi, it’s Kai Yuan, your resident 3D generalist of Noodlets Studio. I’m currently writing this while having a minor cold so I’m sniffling every 5 seconds while bopping to the range of Lady Gaga to Lorde to Conan Gray, stay healthy everyone! In order to make up for my apparent lack of dev logs, I’m going to show you how I create a little stove for Yi’s Eatery. All points made here are going to be super condensed for the sake of not running this article too long.
As with all of our tutorials, we are just amateurs having fun making games and sharing our experience as amateurs with you! :D
Always start with a plan in mind! I say that although I always start creating 3D assets with only 2 active brain cells half the time. Either way, you should still have a plan. This means first of all, gathering references of whatever object you want to create (even if you have a concept art to work off from) and beginning to understand your object’s form. With the stove I created, I used this particular reference image.
You can already see the similarities but these similarities help to sell the object as real. The closer the form of the object is to an actual reference in real life, the more believable it is even if rendered in a non-realistic way.
Once you have enough references and you start to slowly grasp the object you want to create, you should start pinpointing the basic shapes and forms of the object. In the example of the stove, it’s easy to notice that it has a cylindrical shape. Some objects have different components (EG: A car engine) and each component may have a different shape. It’s all about analysing your object and deepening your understanding of the object you want to create.
This preparation process doesn’t take too long for most objects, since a google search and basic shape knowledge is all you need. But taking the effort to prepare will save you a lot of blank staring at your 3D software.
Here’s where the nitty gritty starts to happen. I will preface this by saying that I frankly can’t show you the full process because you’d be reading this till the next day. We have a Youtube video on our Noodlets Studio channel where I modelled the stove on a livestream if you’re interested. In this article, I will just mainly share the important concepts for 3D modelling using the example of the stove.
The creation of all 3D objects follows the simple process of starting with big shapes and then slowly “zooming in” and editing the 3D object with increasing detail.
The above picture illustrates this concept of going from big forms to small details. This is where the knowledge from your preparation comes in. It really helps during the start when you have to block in your big forms. In the example of the stove, I start from a single cylinder and slowly build out the shape as shown in the picture above.
A few functions I like to use (in Maya) when adding in details are the “Bevel” function and the “Insert Edge Loop/Multi-cut” function.
These functions simply revolve around adding more edges/points to manipulate, which is the basis of how you add more details in your 3D object. More points = more details.
When you are adding details to your objects, you have to be mindful you are not adding too much details. Not every corner needs to be beveled and you certainly do not need to unnecessarily cut edges if you are not going to move/extrude them. More points = more details BUT also = more computational power used to render 3D objects. The art style of your game also determines how you model your 3D objects, some require low polygon counts to achieve a cartoon look, some require higher polygon counts to achieve a realistic look. Although, most of us generally prefer the former because it’s easier to do.
The next step after modelling your object is to UV unwrap it. UV unwrapping is the process of creating a UV map where a 2D image can be projected onto the 3D object’s surface.
In the example above, all the faces of the cube were laid out on a 2D plane, which then a texture can be projected onto the UV map and have it reflected on the 3D cube. This is merely the simplest example of a UV map, most UV maps are more complex and require a strong understanding of shapes. For example, this is the UV map for our stove that we created.
Most 3D software allow you to do UV unwrapping of your 3D models, although, you might want to look up a few dedicated tutorials first before jumping into it. This part of 3D modelling is easily one of the most frustrating and difficult parts to understand as there is 0 creativity involved, just pure brain power. :(
Once your 3D model is fully unwrapped, now you want to actually texture it. The simplest way of doing this is to export your UV map into Photoshop or any painting software of your choice and simply paint on it. However, there are a few caveats to take note of. You cannot physically see how your painting affects your 3D model without exporting the texture out into your 3D software. Thus, editing your texture map will be a long arduous process of importing and re-exporting.
In order to circumvent this, we can use dedicated 3D texturing software like Substance Painter which lets you see how your texture is reflected on the model itself. It has the further advantage of allowing you to further enhance your texture with some neat tricks. With a normal map, it will create the illusion of details on a flat surface.
These maps can actually be hand painted in Photoshop, but everything is packaged together in a 3D texturing software like Substance Painter so it’s easier to implement all these details.
Once you got your textures ready, now it’s time to bring it all together! If you are creating a game, you would bring this into your game engine like I did. Or you could also keep it in your 3D software and render it, but that’s a whole other bag of worms.
For the video you saw on our socials, I just slammed a quick backdrop and gave it some lighting to bring out the details of the stove and the final result is as you have seen before.
That’s about it for my tutorial. I hope I have given you an insight into how 3D game objects are created, even if you are just a random passerby. For actual 3D artists out there, hopefully your eyes didn’t burn too much, I’m still trying to get better and I hope to create better 3D models in the future.
Thanks for reading this! My cold has slightly healed while writing this article, remember to stay safe out there! :D
