Dex's Repository of Game Design Projects™: Term Three

This is the technical documentation of the model I have created for my third term project. A production-ready asset was required to be designed and developed by us, which we were asked to look for inspiration from pre-existing game models. This gave me leeway to borrow some concepts by the way Blizzard did work in World of Warcraft and have finally decided to create an ancient gate as seen in the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj:

(Source: http://azerothremembered.blogspot.co.uk/)

My reference sheet for fairly simple, though it was designed in a way so it could be modular since it is meant to be used for a game. Of note is how it changed from the final model in the end.

I started off by attempting to lay down the references in the viewport on all axis. This allowed me to work with more precision due to my box modeling technique.

You start off by creating a polygon cube with the appropriate subdivisions and adjust the vertices accordingly. If more were required I simply created an edge loop for more detail, even though being a low polygon mesh it had to be minimal.

The rest of the archway was continued through extruding part of the base and fitting it along with the design detailed on the reference sheets. Most of the time spent here will be to adjust the vertices on the origin and upward axis.

... and so forth...

... Until the archway is complete. Of interesting note here is the missing gem from the original reference sheet. I have decided this may look better had the gem actually been a separate part of the archway itself and would be hovering right above its slot.

The gem itself isn't difficult to make, albeit I had to play around with mirroring to get the full mesh done. Basically you model one side of the model, mirror it on the opposite axis and merge the connected vertices together, making sure to remove the vertices in-between the meshes. That will cause problems in the future otherwise.

After that it was time add a bit more detail via columns in the scene. This started off with polygon cylinders on each side of the scene (with a few more added later in the back which are added as buffer).

As a bonus effect, I have chosen to "break" the right column down using the boolean tool to separate the mesh into two a distorted plane or mesh.

The result ended up looking like this, after I have laid down the larger part of the column on the floor.

I set the rest of the room up with a single-sided cube. Since it was going to be in the outdoors I deleted the vertical faces.

Then I set up the materials for the textures on each mesh.

The two characters added in were made separately and figured they may enhance the scenery as well as make a good comparison on how usable the model is for a game.