For my simulated work experience project, I was assigned with two others to a 3D project with Jiashi Wang. Jiashi’s project was a series of humorous short films surrounding soldiers in a virtual city. He wanted us to help gather references for props, characters and environments, preferably in a low poly style, with the games “Human Fall Flat”, “Ravenfield”, and “Team Fortress Classic 2” as starting points.
My first thought when given the prompt “low-poly” was the music video for Dire Straits’s Money For Nothing, which uses very early 3D animation, and features characters in a low-poly style like Jiashi was looking for. I gathered some references from this video by taking screencaps, looking for moments which clearly featured the characters, the props and their environments.
I followed a similar approach for my other two reference sources, which were Joel G’s “ENA – Temptation Stairway”, a piece of indie animation on youtube which I’ve loved for years. The ENA series is set in a bizarre, web 1.0 styled world, and uses mixed media 3D and 2D. The whole series has a low-poly, low tech style, so I thought it would be appropriate here.
Lastly, I pulled some references from Super Mario 64. I wrote about this game for my undergrad dissertation so I’m very familiar with it at this stage. Super Mario 64 uses a low-poly look entirely because of the technical limitations of the time, but given that Jiashi was drawing from low-poly games it felt more than appropriate.
After gathering some resources, I tried my hand at modelling some props for Jiashi based on reference photos he’d provided us with. These were some simple models of objects he wanted kept as low-poly as possible. I modelled these in Blender.
In the end I modelled 7 objects, one coke can, two books, an army green chest, two ration packs and a spoon. As requested, I tried to keep all these objects as low-poly as possible. I’m particularly pleased with the coke can, which gave me an opportunity to refamiliarise myself with UV unwrapping in Blender. The ration packs also gave me an opportunity to experiment with a technique for modelling pillows in Blender using the software’s built in cloth simulation system.
All in all, I feel I fulfilled what was requested of me for this work experience project. I enjoyed the challenge of modelling some simple objects and trying to keep the poly count down on all of them. I feel like we probably could’ve been assigned slightly more work, or maybe work of a slightly more challenging nature, like a bit of 3D animation, but I’m not displeased with the work I’ve done for this project and in many ways am glad for the slightly lighter workload.
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