3D Art Journey - My bowl is in the game! (Patreon)

My studies into 3D art continues. Since my last post with the famous donut I've gone on to follow two other tutorials and create an asset for Skyrim! It was a painful endeavour. 

The anvil! Due to me being an idiot, while the model looks fine like this, there are some stretching and errors when I try to put proper texture on it. A valuable lesson was learned. But it still looks pretty neat  and I learned tons. 

The chair! Now this was a challenge since it has multiple parts (legs, seat, back and the wood between the legs) and the shapes themselves are weird too. You don't think about it when you haven't done any 3D (at least I didn't!) but this stuff is COMPLICATED. I'm starting to appreciate the value of good "blueprint" concept art that really shows dimensions and proportions clearly. 

And it has a lovely wooden texture with metal screws! 

After I completed these two tutorials (by Blenderguru on youtube) I felt ready to tackle a test claim from the Arcane University. Basically, creating a Skyrim asset from concept art made by one of the Beyond Skyrim concept artists (I am one! But this is not my concept art) 

These are the concepts I chose. Bowls for Illiac Bay. Bowls and plates are rather easy to model where you only need to model one shape. Now as you can see the concept art is rather lacking - no dimensions are written (is it a smaller soup bowl or a big fruit bowl??) and it's drawn only in perspective which makes it harder to model. But it did suffice for something as easy as a bowl and it was up to me to do the specifics. 

And here's the result!

First I modelled a High Poly (smooth, detailed, no jagged edges) model - but skyrim is old and the higher poly it is the more power it needs to load. You really don't want something simple like a bowl to make the game lag.  

And this is where the problems started. I've never gotten this far before - all my other tutorials only focused on making a high poly. 

Several youtube videos and frustrated sighs later, I eventually managed to make a poly model and with magic 3D fuckery I "applied" the high poly onto the low poly so it'll look much smoother, especially from the front. This was one hell of a learning process. 

And thanks to the painted pattern in the concept art I had to download a new program to paint direcly onto the bowl. Learning the basics of a new program without following tutorials is a pain in the ass but we got there in the end. Again one hell of a learning process.

But it was nothing compared to what lay ahead of me.

Getting it game ready and into the game took me almost an entire day. I'll spare you the details but let's just say I got 4 new programs installed on my PC and at 11 in the evening I gave up. My model just didn't work in game. Nobody understood why. 

Except one guy, who realised I forgot to tick a box early on in the process and that's why it was fucked now. The FRUSTRATION AND RELIEF was real. But I got it into the game! FINALLY!

It looks rather out of place with Skyrim's "viking style" shelves and tankards and bowls, but it's finally in the game, ready for Illiac Bay. 

I'm not sure what I'll create next. It'll be a surprise! Now I really need to work on commissions.