Week 1 & 2 - Tasmanian Tourist Attraction

281 days ago by LuddyFish

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Fig.1 - Photo of the silos on Maria Island (Photo taken by myself)

So before Week 1, I visited Maria Island and decided that I would create a 3D model of something there. And what would you know but the silos, a perfect, iconic part of Maria Island's Darlington as you arrive off the ferry (Fig.1).

Barrel

As a reintroduction of getting used to Blender again, I made a barrel (shown in Fig.2) with guidance from SirPinkBeard's Youtube video.

Fig.2 - DK Barrel

Silos (Tourist Attraction)

Afterwards I got into making the silos. It was a pretty straight forward process. I first created one silo with the legs and hatch until I was happy with it. The body of the silo was really easy to make as it was a simpler version of the barrel in Fig.2. I even could segment the body easily due to the silos themselves providing a reference of cuts. I then duplicated it four times and lined them up evenly like the real silos. I then modelled a base for the silos to stand on, the top "roof", and the awkwardly shaped "mid-base". All was well until I got to texturing. The first problem I encountered was that I forgot to arrange the tiles of the silo body the right way around to be painted (shown in Fig.3). Then the more devastating problem was that the materials did not save, causing a lot of wasted time (Fig.4). It was really demotivating, nearly making me want to give up. I really liked the materials I had as well...

Fig.3 - Silo Body where the texture map had some individual tile segment the wrong way around

Fig.4 - The silos with the material paint lost. Really sad moment

At least in the end, it was finally done. I kind of like the new material of the silos as the lines appear more worn than they used (unfortunately I don't have a reference of comparison anymore). I did find trouble in painting the three flat bases as they were scaled unevenly from the original shape of a cube. I was able to paint over the base and roof themselves rather than the UV map, but the middle base was a little more tricky as it had extruded parts that added to its complexity. But it turned out fine as shown in Fig.5. The base also originally came from here as a reference to texture the base.

Fig.5 - The completed model of the silos

Importing into Unity

With the silos complete, I created a very basic scene in Unity where I exported the silos and barrel from Blender and imported them into Unity. There was some difficulty with another material lost (but thankfully it was the only one and it was a minor loss). I realised as well that adding the materials into Unity was a lot more tedious because I did not name materials with the respective object(s), causing a lot of confusion. There were also a lot of unnecessary material duplicates, which is something I shall consider for my next models. Fig.6 shows the final scene where I did some mucking about just to get a feel of the 3D scene in Unity.