Personal and Professional Practice 3: 'Engage' Studio Brief - Prison Wagon

The next environment that I wanted to work on was just one object to go in it and that was a prison wagon that Callum (Brown off my course) wanted me to model. This again is going to feature in this animal cowboy world that him and his brother Stuart are creating. This prison wagon appears throughout one of his comics and he was finding it difficult to draw from different angles so I decided to model it for him so that he could open it up in Unity and look and draw from any angle that he wanted to.

I started off fairly simple and began by planning out the basic shape, Callum was great and drew out some orthographic drawings for me to begin modelling from and this really helped me to get first the basic shape and then start to add in a lot of the details after.

It started off well and I got the shape of the carriage made very quickly along with the wheels, as I just made the shape of the hole using geometry and then used Booleans to essentially cut the hole out, making each wheel very quickly before duplicating them and ensuring that they were the same size. Once happy with their look I started to look at the bars and how I was going to create them.

Initially as seen below you can see that I again tried to use Booleans but for some reason it let me do about 7 and then filled in the holes, which was something that I didn’t understand. I tried to model the main carriage again but still I had the same problem so for now while I was working out what to do next I filled it back in and left it be.

I then moved onto adding in some more of the details, and adding some extra ones. When looking at reference images of old prison wagons they would have needed a step at the back to get in which is something simple I added onto the back and then adding a railing in so they could hold onto it. Also as this is still set in the universe where there would be different types of animal this railing would be useful for smaller animals to climb up and get into the wagon.

I then looked at the front, where there was this quite elaborate looking design feature on the front where the wagon rider would sit. Again due to the fact they are animals Callum wanted the driver to be a bird which is why there is a bar there, this is what the bird would rest his feet on and then sit down, making it suitable for him. I really like this feature and I added in small semi-circular details as well which would have been made out of gold.

I then moved back to the bars as this was the only detail I had left to add in, and just ended up making a big hole all the way through to which I then added bars by hands as this made it much easier than not understanding what was going wrong before. Here I then also hollowed out the middle so that there was actually an area inside, and later on when its done I may see if there needs to be some furniture added in, as they would have sat on benches and not the floor.

I then added in the final details like the brake handle and the beams underneath, which I’m not amazingly happy with, but as I couldn’t get reference images from underneath one of these wagons and Callum hadn’t drawn it, I had to guess most of it which I guess turned out okay. But overall this is the finished model below and I am super happy with it. This is only my second attempt at a vehicle and this went so much better than the van that I attempted to create last year, especially when there is a lot more going on as well.

I then went onto UV mapping it which went straight forward enough, despite my hatred for this part as I find it very tedious and time consuming, but then I got onto texturing which I found very fun. I once again used a graphics tablet to be able to paint the textures myself and I was very happy with the final look to it. I wanted to use these bit wood panels as instructed but made them a bit darker than originally planned as it seemed to work better and the mood created made it look a lot more sinister. I think the overall design works well and would fit into the universe very nicely. As far as the modelling goes I am over the moon with the result as this is definitely a successful vehicle and hopefully will inspire me to keep going onto next week to think of something else to model.