Modelling and Texturing in Blender

Making the WALL-E Model involved several steps; Block Modelling the initial body shape, sculpting the blocks into the correct shapes, detailing added across the model, UV unwrapping and finally texturing. I started the block model by placing a reference image in the background of the scene and quickly adding cube meshes and resizing them into place of the separate parts of WALL-E. As seen in the image carousel to the right, from here each piece was fleshed out and detailed accordingly, slowly creating the recognisable character we know and love. Next, the modifiers needed to be added (Mainly Boolean and Subdivision Surface) in order to finely tune each piece into the more identifiable smooth surfaces, and making the mechanical pieces interact logically, with bolts and pieces interacting as if they are holding each other together.

Making the Scene and Asset Models involved mapping out the shape of the Home Scene and scaling the walls, floor and ceiling into the accurate shape to match the source material. Detailing was then sculpted into the pieces of the room, marking pathing and creating doorways for the home to mirror the animations dimensions. The mass asset creation was the longest part of this project to complete, with a large amount of separate models needing to be modelled and textured, with a finite amount of time allocated to this task. This task could not be fully completed and the full list of inventory was not created for the scene, only the most unique or important models were prioritized.

The texturing stage involved importing several types of metal and even fabrics from Bridge and adjusting the scale of each in their corresponding UV editors to create realistic sizing and make surfaces reflect the source material appropriately. After selecting the correct materials, these were baked onto the models with a 4k resolution each and the render engine switched to cycles to work on light reflection on the materials. In addition to this, several textures were created from scratch, one of particular interest was the bottle textures, where coloured glass were created with the scene lighting able to interact and pass through as it’s real life counterpart would. A texture attempt the would have been beneficial to finish was rust for the WALL-E model, however, even after playing around with settings and colouring for a while, it never seemed to fit the model correctly.

When presenting the models to peers, mainly positive feedback was received, with several comments made on room for improvement with the project work so far. One comment suggested that the detailing on the WALL-E model was not showcased enough due to default lighting not fully enveloping the shaping and forming shadows where there would be in the original animation. Working solo on this project allowed me to work at my own pace and cut out and conflicts of interest on the project development, which often occur in group projects and affect the focus of the workload. One limitation of working alone however, is that due to the massive amount of model creation and scene cluttering (when a scene needs to be filled with models to look like a realistic and interacted with environment) the progress was slower than initially anticipated and affected the final stage of the project before deadline.