“There will be plenty more in the future.” - Feb 2, 2017
Well, I wasn’t expecting a 2.5+ year pause between posts when I wrote that. Shortly after my previous post, I started working in the 3D industry full-time; which can be quite a time consuming occupation. However, I now have some time to work on my own personal projects; so why not a breakdown of one of my recent assets?

This is my “Old Telegraph” prop I made a little while ago, and it was a really valuable learning experience. The goal was to focus on realism almost entirely, but keep it within the technical limitations of a modern game hero prop. With those goals in mind, the prop weighs in at 6,974 polygons and is covered by a single 4k texture set.

For this project, there were two major challenges; first was creating a high quality wood material for the base. Until this prop, I was never really satisfied with my wood materials, so this was an excellent opportunity to improve on that type of material. The second challenge was portraying decades upon decades of dust, wear, discoloration and general aging. Fortunately, since I own this particular telegraph (it sat on my desk for the duration of this project), I had excellent reference to take inspiration and notes from.

I think I addressed both those challenges quite well; by utilizing a ‘layered’ approach to my materials, I had very fine control of the look the final render. Each material, so the wood, dark metal, light metal, the two different brass metals, and plastic, are each made of around 10-15 layers, each adding very minute detail, such as wood grain, or small wear and gloss variation on the plastic.

Another thing key component for this asset was my ongoing improvement on presentation. I now use a more ‘proper’ light-box setup, allowing for the asset to be shown in a nice white (or any other color) ambient environment. In addition, my lights were further adjusted to highlight variations in gloss and shine, resulting in some nice eye-catching specular highlights. This was done by switching to a more conventional setup, consisting of a key light, two fill lights (left and right) and a back light.

Overall, I think this asset turned out well, and I learned a lot of new techniques that I will be applying to my future projects.