Basic breakdown for how I modeled and textured this mailbox designed for a game environment.
First step is the planning stage. I gathered references from both from the internet as well as taking several pictures of my creepy apartment’s mailbox.
Since this is to be an asset for a game I planned to the polycount lower than I would for a production model. That said, since this is an asset that will potentially be seen up close I wanted to make sure that there would still be sufficient detail.
I decided the detail would be mainly handled by the materials rather than the geometry since it’s not an extremely important object in the grand scheme of things.
I gathered my references and quickly modeled and unwrapped the mailbox in 3DS Max. Not too hard considering a majority of this particular object is simply a series of boxes. The real challenge came in the creation of the materials.
Total size came to 1222 tris (639 poly).
Again, with the references in mind I created the materials in Substance Designer and Photoshop. The trickiest part was to get the labels to look correct.
The game this is being designed for is on the darker side so I added a lot of wear and aging to the labels. From experience I knew that the labels on mailboxes tended to be kind of a mess in general so I put them in various formats (label maker vs handwritten) and states of disrepair (torn or crossed out) and had some just flat out missing.
To display the model I took a wall section from the game and placed the mailbox in front of it to get an idea of how it would look in game. I used Marmoset Toolbag 2 to capture these images. The wall texture was one of the first materials I made in Substance Designer and it made me happy to see how I have become more efficient using Substance Designer.
There are a few things I would like to change if I have time in the future. One thing is I feel like I could add some more geometry in some places to get rid of some hard edges and I would like to tweak the materials a little bit more.
That said, I’m happy with how this came out.
