3D 4- Making a UFO

During this lesson we looked at making a UFO for our Space Shooter game we're currently making in unity. We began with a simple cylinder shape and manipulated the faces and extruded the top out to make it a more accurate ufo-like shape.

We then looked at UV mapping our UFO. Luckily my shape was quite simplistic, with not too many Edge loops. I 'Planar' mapped by UFO s this gave the most accurate representation of it.

Finished UV map. 

The UV map was then snapshotted and taken into photoshop and edited. I changed it a few times to get the best look for my UFO. 

Original design

Final design

We then added a 'Blinn' material to our UFO and imported our finished image. This process was the same as how we did the spaceship. 

Original Imported mapping onto our UFO

Edited version imported

The 'Specularmap' image used allowed the spaceship to become more metallic-looking, to make it look more realistic and shine.

We then looked at making the elements of our UFO more realistic. To do this we would make the spherical shapes on our UFO 3D by making a new sphere object and moving them to the correct positions around the UFO.

Sphere's added to the UFO. 

To attach the sphere's to the ship we had to use the 'Transfer Maps' tool. The target mesh, being the shape we will attach the spheres too, was our UFO and the source meshes were the spheres themselves. The output was set to 'Normal' and was then baked. 

'Baked' UFO. 

Sadly it didn't come out the way I expected however I will repeat the process at a later date to make the sphere's smaller so that the colour's don't bleed as much as they did.

We lastly looked at animating our spaceship, for our Space Shooter game. This was done by adding keyframes and the first and last frame, starting the X axis at '0' and changing it at the last frame to '360' so it rotates 360 degrees.

The 'Time Slider' within Maya.