Patrick's House

 For Patrick's house, I needed to find a rock that was the right proportions and texture to match the show's artwork. Working with my fossils for the previous semester meant I brought my whole collection to work with and some of that collection is minerals.

This geode was the perfect roundness and size for scanning but was only one half. If I could successfully scan, flip and stitch the two together I would have a pretty convincing rock for the house.

Because the polished side of the geode was completely smooth and shiny the initial scan was pulling reflections from the surroundings and interpreting it as topology. This created a messy connection between the geode and the paper/box as well as curving the polished face.

The second attempt made a much cleaner object to cut away and without any warping to the geode.

Once in Maya, I oriented the model so that the edge loop of the polished face would match up when flipped. By removing the faces of the polished side I started stitching it together. Although it is not a perfect hemisphere I like the slight offset as I think it seems more realistic.

Using the cane I modelled previously, I started creating the tiki/bamboo antenna on top.

Since this model could technically be modular I started by cutting it up into each section. I stretched them slightly to make it a little thinner and longer. For sections that were going to connect to other pieces I left them open-ended but there are parts that needed capping.

To create this I took the part of the cane where the amber sat and simplified it, removing the caps and extrusions as well as levelling out the middle by removing the socket.

After adjusting some of the UVs I started connecting the modular pieces and assembling the antenna. Using a cube I was able to cut one half of the arrow parallel to the direction of the main pole. I then flipped this half and connected them to make the arrow.

I resized some of the parts so that they would connect to each other without revealing overlapping topology which adds some nice variation to the model.

The texturing in substance was a simple process since I only had to recolour the rock and texture the antenna. For the geode I simple added a fill layer above the texture with the multiply blending option and altered the colour to find one that matched well without losing detail from the original texture. The floor was the same texture as the one for Spongebob's house but with the layer that created the stones turned off.

The antennae is texture with the American Cherry Wood material with adjusted colours. The main colour covered everything on the exterior of the bamboo, I selected a darker colour for the inside loop of the cylinder and for any exposed separating layer between the sections I chose a lighter, less shiny version.

When importing it to UE4 I initially had an issue where the section breaks between each chunk of the antenna were invisible. I later discovered this was due to it's scale in Maya and UE4 failed to recognise the topology. I resized it and scaled it down in UE4 to match the change.

Although it is simple I like this addition to the museum and completing the full set is something I will be aiming for.