Game Production - A load of rubbish

As promised, I've finally gotten round to now being able to post my wheelie bin project. At first I thought that a bin surely couldn't be very much harder than a dalek. After all, bins don't have those 'ball' things which I had to painfully move into place and angle individually. However, after starting I realised it was much harder than I had anticipated, and then when it came to texturing I didn't have a clue where to even start. Saying all this, what I produced in the end did have some bin-qualities, I learnt the basics of texturing, and I found that photoshop can be my friend sometimes, so I believe it to have been mildly successful in that sense.

So this is the finished bin, and I'm pleasantly surprised in this render that the plastic details beneath the lid on the front of the bin line up pretty well, sadly the same couldn't be said for the rest of the faces. I'm pretty pleased with the way it looks slightly seamless all the way round, and this was due to me spending a long time on Photoshop shouting "blend!" at the screen.

The side view illustrates what I mean about the way the texture lines up with the model. I'm also not a fan of the way the wheel doesn't look particularly rounded, but I'm honestly just pleased the Alpha worked because it took some time for me to work it out. I think it'd also be important for me to mention that I took my texture images when it had just rained, and so my bin has a sort of grainy, maybe even concrete-like, look which wasn't particularly great. I now know that rain = bad.

And so there it is, my first ever textured piece and I have to say, even though it's grainy, the logo on the front doesn't line up properly and the wheel isn't quite wheel-shaped, I made something and I'm quite proud of it regardless of what it looks like. I'll look back at this one day and realise what a load of rubbish it actually is (excuse the pun), but I'll remember that I went from nothing to something.