Viking Shield

Viking Shield - Game Ready

One of my first high quality projects after starting my 3D artist journey a few months before. This was created by following a tutorial by Tautvydas, many thanks to him for sharing his knowledge. It was a great starting point for learning the ins and outs of the game asset pipeline.

Struggles

Finding a balance between optimal topology and object silhouette

This was something I struggled to wrap my head around. Many times when I look at assets in games, you can see some sort of tessellation in the geometry silhouette, but it's not something you want to show in your portfolio work. They have their differences and telling my mind that "it's okay to add more topology to make it look good" is fine for this personal work.

Proper UV seams and layouts

UVs have always been a pain point for me and others I've known. Maybe it just wasn't taught well, maybe I just never hit the nail on the head. After going over some rules of thumb when it comes to seams and layouts (in terms of hard surface objects), I got decently comfortable at figuring it out on my own many, many unwraps later.

Post-Mortem

All in all, I will stand by the fact that this project gave me a solid foundation in the game asset pipeline. From concept to render, I've been able to take this knowledge and transfer it over to my own personal projects. After being able to recognize my weaknesses and learn from those mistakes, I feel like I've become a better artist on the other side of this. Thanks for reading!

Wireframe, UVs and Statistics for the curious:

Tris: 2842

Materials: 1

Textures: 4k, no channel packing (didn't know of it yet)

Could use more optimization, but I'm proud of it nonetheless.