Sketched some ideas for the high to low poly chest project.
Decided on a combination of these two:
They are both recognizable as a wooden chest which is important because players can understand the purpose of the object but it also has decoration such as the spirals on either side of the lid or the circular bolts on the sketch below to add some more character and individuality.
I created a high poly and low poly chest separately to try baking the low poly chest and using substance painter to texture the object.
I started by making a high poly model, deleting faces, edges and vertices to make it low poly, and UV unwrapping the low poly model to export it into substance painter.
The model has a trapezoid shape to look more exaggerated and appealing to the eye and spirals either side of the chest as I had planed in the pre-production stage to make the design more interesting.
I covered the model in a wooden texture using the fill tool and coloured some of the chest gold to create some contrast. After this it still looked flat so I added some hard surface stamping around the model to appear slightly more detailed and I like the result of that.
The model itself has lines that are not parallel to each other making the hard surface stamping difficult with square, parallel shapes to stamp with.
By keeping the square stamp far enough from the tilted lines, I think it looks better positioned and more intentional.
Sketchfab link:
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