Project 2: Space Invaders Clone, 3D Design

To create the spaceship for my game I used the program 3DS Max. As this was my first time using 3DS Max (for serious reasons, not just messing around) it was a bit confusing to start off with, but after literally fiddling around with the different tools on offer and of course being taught how to use the tools effectively it became quite a joy to use.
To start my spaceship I simply created a box and re-sized it to roughly how big I wanted my spaceship to be.

Before collapsing my box into an editable poly (explained later) I changed the amount of segments the square has. Basically the more segments (Poly's) the more detail that can be added, but it also increases the size of the file and therefore if you have a lot of Poly's the game that you are using the 3D object in might not be able to run it as efficiently as hoped. Below is the perspective  view of my square with extra segments.

I now felt confident enough to start to manipulate the square to create my spaceship. To do this I collapsed the square into an editable Poly, this basically means that the object can be manipulated to really whatever you wish. After some time I finally created my spaceship and I was very happy with the outcome. 

Here is the perspective view of my final spaceship and also the front, side and top view.

Here is a view of my rendered spaceship.

Now that I have finished the model of my spaceship the next thing I had to do was to apply a texture to it. The method I used for doing this is called UV Mapping. Basically what UV Mapping allows you to do is to flatten your 3D Model into a number of 2D sheets for texturing, then you basically wrap those 2D sheets back around your 3D Model meaning that it now has your texture on it.

When you first start to unwrap your 3D model things can look very confusing as I will show you in a screenshot below, but I will then show you how it can be really east to do (and quite fun in my opinion!).

It may be really hard to see in the image above but the very feint green lines are my 3D Model flattened out, obviously I cannot just texture this UV Map as it's very confusing and wouldn't be anywhere near accurate, so what you have to do is separate the green lines into recognisable parts of the 3D Model, therefore when you open the file in a program such as Photoshop you will be able to tell what each part is and be able to accurately texture your 3D Model.

To select individual parts of the UV Map to group together I find to do the selection process on your actual 3D Model, then this allowed me to be exact as shown in the screen shot below.

As you can see in the screen shot I have selected the front panel of my spaceship, this has been highlighted on both my perspective view of my spaceship and the UV Map, all I had to do then is move that part aside and repeat the process for the rest of the ship, keeping in mind to try and select parts that make sense to put together, such as the base of the ship, the cockpit and wings etc...
In the end this is what my UV Map looked like;

Then after I textured the UV Map in Photoshop this is what it then looked like

You may now be able to see the different parts of my ship better than the un-textured UV Map. I then applied this texture back to my 3D Model and this was the result;

In the next post I will talk through creating the game in Unity using this space ship design.