3D Art Week 03

Lord of the Rings Lego Pieces

On character team for the recreation of the lego version of the Two Towers's Battle of Helm's Deep, I am responsible for the character of Gimli.

Gimli's lego character has slightly shorter legs, a helmet, beard and ax prop.  For this week's unique lego piece to add to the library, I modeled Gimli's Ax.

I started with a poly cylinder and simple box modeling using extruding, the multi-cut tool and the edge loop tool to model the ax head, handle and clip-on connecting piece.  After I was satisfied with the models and edge flow of the 7 separate pieces, I combined the meshes into one mesh, smoothed the mess and deleted the history.

After finishing the hi-poly version of the model, I UVed it and organized the UV shells in the UV editor.  Then keeping in mind the UV seams, I duplicated the high poly model and deleted edges until I created a lo-poly version of the ax.

Then I created an LOD group in Maya using by selecting both hi-poly and lo-poly meshes and FILE>EDIT>LOD GROUP.  Then I adjusted the appearance of the lo-poly version in the viewport using harden and soften edges where appropriate.

After I was satisfied with the LOD, I selected each mesh and exported them separately as FBX files.

I then imported the hi-poly version (Gimli Ax LOD 0) into UE4.  I opened the asset details and imported the lo-poly version (Gimli Ax LOD1) under the LOD drop menu.

Now when I zoom the camera away from the ax in UE4, you can see the model switching between the hi-poly model and lo-poly model.