3:10 to Ikea

I have been dreading this you know? Not because I don't like modelling tables or furniture or anything like that. Just because my desk is so over the top full of rubbish I honestly can't see the colour of the top of the desk. Well enough whining out of me, lets dive right into modelling My Desk.

I started off by creating the simple objects that make up my desk in the first place (My Desk is mostly Cylinders and Cuboids anyway). Then these were put together and dimensions were modified to make it look like the general shape of the desk.The next item to deal with was the stoppers at the bottom of the desk that ended off the metal pipes at the bottom and the pads at the bottom. To do this I simply created another sphere and made it alot thinner so that it looked more like a fatter disc than a thin sphere. These were made as wide as the metal pipes and slotted into the front of the pipes. Then these were cloned and made thinner still so that they looked completely flat. These then went to be the supporting base of the pipes on the floor.
You may have noticed that the colour of the pipes had changed in the second picture. This is because it has! It may sound stupid when coming to texturing, but the metal pipes of my desk, after the many years of me owning it has become grey (Or maybe it was grey to begin with? Ikea isn't really the center for high quality metal that will be shiny forever!). So I used the grey colour texture for all of the metal parts.
The next step was to create a slight rounded effect for the edge of the top unit. To do this I used the slice plan to turn the whole ring round edge of the top wooden unit and made one polygon into 3 polygons. Then the middle polygon was moved out to create the effect that my desk has on the edge.
The next part was to start texturing. I got some feedback from my tank on my opinion of UV Wrapping, so yes the tank will be retextured AFTER the new parts are added starting next monday. I actually used UV Wrapping for the table edge so lets get started discussing that. I got a texture off the web of wooden stripes (Link will be at bottom of post. Links will function in this way from now on) and applied this to the edges of the table. Then after adding the UV Wrapping modifier to it, I made it repeat itself alot more widthwise and repeat itself less heightwise. Below you can see the end result of that.
You may notice that the top texture already applied. That because it was and I forgot to get a print screen of it.... Whoops... Lets cover that now then. For the top and bottom of the upper unit I used the same wooden texture (This texture was also used for the back wooden part, which will not be covered in detail), with the same UV Wrapping technique that was used for the desk edge. The different was that this texture was made shorter and wider before repeating. For the back panel the texture was made very small so it could repeat alot through UV Wrapping. Below can be seen the textures after being applied.

And below can be seen the fully rendered product. This may be used again, as in some sort of room, but for now it is going to be filed under "Completed".

So that was a big post wasn't it! Just so you know, regular posts will not be as long as this, just wanted to go through this in detail. See you guys on Wednesday where we will look at modelling a games console!

Links: Desk Edge: http://www.asianartmall.com/about/about-puzzlebox-patterns.htm

Desk Top: http://www.amishtables.com/our-furniture/wood-species

Desk Model is the property of Matthew Nunn Copyright 2010(c)

I claim no copyright over any of the textures used.