I was chosen to take part in world skills 2021 and in this i was tasked with modelling a hot air balloon however i had constraints to work within:
The low poly model of your balloon must not exceed 10000 Triangles. It can be less, but no more!
You are allowed two use 2 material pages. One page for your burner, basket, ropes and basket contents. One page for your balloon.
▪Your materials must be made up of: A base colour or diffuse texture map, A normal map, A metallic map, A roughness map.
The dimensions of these maps need to be 4096x4096.
I started in Maya where i begun to model the basket for the hot air balloon this was pretty basic as all i did was add some edge loop to bring down the middle to get the curve in the basket for the hand rails. With the base shape blocked out i started to extrude out details like the hand rail leather top that i wanted for texturing but later on i realise the edge flow on the hand rail wasn't up to scratch as it was zigzagging so i decided to remodel and it turned out much better. The next thing that i modelled was the support and burner, the burner itself i wasn't initially happy with so i kept playing around with different designs until i was happy. I moved on to the balloon and supports, for the balloon i used a sphere and soft select to get the shape of a hot air balloon and for the support i extruded off of the corners to get it to connect to the basket and balloon. At this point i tried to UV unwrap my model but i came across an issue with the support and how when i tried to unwrap and baked in substance it just didn't look good it was all stretched, so i started again on the support system and went for two brackets on the basket and had them connect by a cube that i manipulated with soft select. Although i wasn't happy with the rope so instead i extruded it along a curve and it looked much more natural for the rope shape i was going for. The balloon was also adjusted by bevelling some extruded in curves to create the divots. The last finishing touches the handles on the side and the rope that controlled the burner this was to meet the functionality requirement and bring it more to life.
To start texturing i gave the entire model a unwrap so that i could take it into substance and start texturing. My first pass at textured had a wicker texture going around the basket that i got off of substance share and adjusted it to my liking the hand rail got a leather texture to show of the weathered look to it. The burners got a iron texture and the supports got a nicer metal texture to show off how the balloon is kept together. i added some more details like mud splashes to make it look like mud splashes up on landing i also added weathering to the balloon silk.
After getting some feedback i redone some aspects of the textures like not having the mud splashes going up the sides i instead limited it to the bottom. The leather was also changed to something that wasn't so blocky. The Balloon texture also got a big change first i made the texture alternate between red and blue then on top of that i added patchs using a stich alpha over a squad silk texture. I then used a bitmap to put a texture of a hot air balloon logo on the sides.
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