Treasure chest project

 For this project we were tasked with modelling a low poly treasure chest which opened and closed on a hinge. I really enjoyed this project as I was able to pick up even more skills and different tools to use in order to improve the quality of my work. I already have some ideas of how I plan to texture my chest once I have finished unwrapping it. Below I will insert some screenshots of the process, mistakes and how I fixed them. In this project I also tried to make sure that my chest had nice topology and could be game engine ready if it needed to be once unwrapped and baked. I was excited at all the possibilities I had when modelling this as I added some of my own touches using some tools that I previously picked up. Later on if I have time I may add some extra details such as more objects inside or out.

This is my finished result with my dagger stuck in the sand- below I will show some steps I took in achieving this.

Here is the start of the base of my chest, along with chamfer, bevel, inset and extrude I was able to create this using a basic cuboid shape. On this screenshot I had just extruded the faces of my chest inward to create a more dimensional and aesthetic appearance, later on I go on to adding a second bevel to further refine the shape.

 I also connected up some edges and target welded some verts in order to create this shape so that when I extruded it inward it would create a nice almost lock like shape to it. 

This was the finished result of the extrusion I am pleased with how this shape looks and how much dimension the box now has. 

I then moved onto to the lid and did this is a similar way to the base but using a cylinder sliced in half, I added the chamfers and bevels to stick with the shape of the base.

Once the main body of the chest was done I added some simple feet made out of cubes which I sculpted to have a more aesthetic appeal and also some ring handles either side which I made using the spline tool. I struggled a bit getting to grips with the spline however I think it turned out ok in the end.

I then went and corrected any problems I faced with the topology and geometry of the mesh. Here some of the geometry had gotten tangled and there was some strange verts on the inside of the model from where I had made changes to the shape of the chest. I fixed these by target welding these verts and connecting them up so that the mesh was no longer tangled.

This was the finished result after untangling the verts and mesh. 

Another issue I wanted to fix was the topology of the chest. As you cant have shapes that are more than 4 sides I used a tool which pointed out all polys over this count and then connected verts up in order to split these shapes into ones which only had 3-4 edges as this is what would need to happen if it was going to be put into a game. Once this was all fixed my chest had nice topology. 

Here is how I dealt with the previous issue, the shape has now been split into a 4 sided poly and a tri. 

Another issue I had was this strange fold that had been created on the lid, to fix this all I had to do was weld the 2 verts to the vert at the point in the middle and the geometry was fixed.

Here is a picture of the finished topology of the chest. I also added some little studs using the pyramid tool.

This was the final outcome, there's a lot I would have liked to have added but some of it I'm not sure how to do. In the future I would like to take this into zbrush and sculpt it using that. I am pleased with the outcome and I definitely leant how to troubleshoot a lot of issues during this process which I tackled. I would also like to experiment a bit more with the shape of the chest as I think it could look more interesting. This project was a challenge but I learnt how to use many new tools in the process.