Recycle!

I have now finished the bin project! (Just about, I think.)

Quality time with my guru third years was had this week, who gave me some good advice and words of knowledge. They also emphasised the importance of making sure there are no polygons with more than four edges - so I spent a lot of time making bridges between the sides of various polygons.

I also spent hours tackling a silly triangulation problem. I still have no idea what was going on (and neither did anyone else, it seems) but for some reason a dark shadow kept on showing up in the middle of one side of the bin, stretching diagonally across the corners, as if there was another edge there, that became even more prominent in smoothing. I played around with the layout of the edges and the connected vertices as well as the positioning of the vertices and ended up making a new main body for the bin in the end. All very strange.

The unwrapping took me quite a few attempts until I finally sorted out the plan for my texture sheet. I decided to show all four sides of the bin instead of overlaying the left and right side on top of each other because I thought I might as well make use of all four reference photographs.

I also chose not to 'straighten' most of the selections as this distorted their original shape; so although it'd look all nice and organised on the plan, there would be a higher risk of distorted texture on the final 3D model. And with the wheel present in the render sheet below, it's clear that I ended up ditching the alpha channel and chose to texture the wheel the normal way. I'll make sure to use alpha channels very soon.

Texturing in Photoshop wasn't too bad. There was a bit of a challenge in editing the images to make all of the colours match, and of course there had to be no seams or shadows. I worried that if I edited too much the final render would look too smooth and as if I hadn't added a texture at all!

Once that was finished all that needed sorting was the re-setting of the pivot and then arranging the polygons into smoothing groups which fortunately didn't take too long.

So here it is! My finished bin at 564 tris. Plenty of room for smoothing out some rough edges if I choose to... but I think I've spent enough time looking at bins for the past two weeks.