3D Modeling - Hard Surface Modeling

16.10.2023 - 6.10.2023 (Week 7 - Week 10)
Vanessa Kei Kurniadi / 0360525
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
3D Modeling - Hard Surface Modeling

---

INSTRUCTIONS

In this task, we were instructed to make a model that falls into one of these categories:

- a weapon

- a vehicle

- a robot

- a machine

After thinking for a while, I decided to make a weapon from a game called Valorant. The weapon is a pistol called a Classic in the game. For this task, I'm making the Prime skin of the Classic.

fig 1.1 Prime Classic

For this task, I used the method of only making half the main body for me to mirror later. I actually plan on using this technique on everything but I decided small objects are fine to be left alone, so I just make them and make sure they can't be selected so they will stay in place.

I open the Valorant app to see the skin preview on the collection tab to see the details of the gun a bit better. The fact that I could spin around the weapon makes it really easy for me to see the details that I need to pay attention to. On the contrary, this doubles the workload on my laptop and makes the laptop really hot. It even blue screened once because of this :')

fig 1.2 Prime classic preview in Valorant

fig 1.3 Making the main body

I use bevel in some areas that I think shouldn't look sharp, and little by little shape up the main body of the pistol. I basically just repeatedly did some extrude and moved the edges or vertices here and there.

fig 1.4 View of the main body

It took me a long time to finally finish making just half of the main body. It looked simple at first, but when I look closer to the model, there were lots of details that I needed to pay attention into. But after hours and hours of working I'm finally done with the shape. I also have added the little diamonds on the side of the upper body.

The thing that makes it take so long to finish is the little bent inward areas on the side of the main body. Some of them need additional cuts for the colouring phase later on, some need even more details, like the purple grip on the grip area, and the diamonds and triangle that need to be added in the others. I have to make sure that the extrude doesn't destroy the overall shape. Since the amount of cuts on the main body is already plenty, some extrude resulted in weird outcomes that is not according to what I want, so I had to look for a way to make them look the way I wanted them to look.

fig 1.5 Completed components of the Prime Classic

When the main body is finally done, I started to make the rest of the components to make the complete look of the pistol. I basically just redid the same thing over and over again to create different shapes. The only different thing is that I used the boolean modifier to make a hole at the front of the pistol and insert a cylinder on it. And with that, I've made the main body, the trigger, the trigger guard, the lock, and the muzzle.

Afterwards, I just copied and mirrored the object that has only half the part, and joined them into one object. I also gave the model some colors and used a cycle render engine to make the final look, and this is how it turned out:

fig 1.6 Rendered look of the Prime Classic

I gave this rendered image as a submission for the task, but apparently, Mr Kamal said that the model has a low poly, and it needs a lot of cleaning up.

I think the Prime Classic model is originally a boxy shape model, thus I thought creating it as a low poly won't be a problem, especially since the final look looks much like the original. But then when I asked Mr Kamal about why I can't use the slice tool on some parts of my model, he explained that this is because there are a lot of overlapping faces on the work, which needs to be cleaned out, thus why he said previously that my work needs some cleaning. So I understand that even though it looks fine, the model itself is actually a mess, so I decided that I will clean it out while also making it high poly.

the process itself took me days to do. It gets quite frustrating when I find out that a lot of faces are overlapping in my work, making it quite hard to fix. But I took a few hours and dedicated myself to the model, and after about a week, I finally finished it, with the model properly cleaned out, it looks fine even with level 3 smoothing, which makes me very proud and the days of hard works paid out in the end. Here is what it looks like in the end:

fig 1.7 High Poly Prime Classic

Final Look

fig 2.1 Prime Classic Solid Non-Wireframe with Cycle render engine

fig 2.2 Prime Classic Solid Wireframe Eevee preview with viewport render image

---

REFLECTION

Experience

This task is probably one of the hardest tasks I've ever gotten so far. The process of making the main shape, and then proceeding to making the little to tiny details one by one was such a grinding experience. And when I thought it was over, it turned out I missed the most important parts and had to spend days working on it again, which was very frustrating for me. But thankfully, Mr Kamal was there to help me answer my questions and let me know what I should do. He patiently gave some examples of my work so I knew exactly what I should do afterwards, which I'm really grateful for.

Observation

When I did my first submission, I saw that everyone has a high poly model, which make me thought that I should at least to make mine the same way. I also saw that they are really creative on what they made. Some made really cute models of vehicles, some made cute robots, and someone also made a Valorant object just like me, which seems nice cause I feel like I have a friend lol. Nevertheless, they are all really good models, which makes me aim to do even better, not for anyone else, but for myself.

Findings

I found out 2 very important things in this task. 1, is that I should always make my design a high poly. A good way to check is by simply smoothing it out. If the shape is ruined, then something is not right, 2. Is about overlapping layers. The many days I spent cleaning my work made me more aware of signs of overlapping layers, and how to fix them, which was something I had a lot of trouble on. So this is definitely going to help me in the future.