Alchemist's Table

Alchemist's Table is apart of a personal project of mine, Spliced, a series that has the main goal of creating small set pieces that tell a story with just the assets and textures as well as aiding me in developing my skills. I plan to focus on different ascepts of modelling from poly count to packing texture.

With Alchemist's Table, it was a test to practise UV packing as well as working in a purely low poly pipeline, only adding to the normal and height textures with the use of Substance Painter instead of baking a high poly model. I was able to pack the textures down into 6 different materials and keep the poly count below 3000 for the entire scene.

This piece started as an idea one late night after work, I instantly opened Photoshop and start to stetch out my idea. It was heavily inspired by my recent rewatch of the Fullmetal Alchemist series, the symbols in the show and the idea of trying to create the near impossible Philosopher's stone lead me down a path of imagining a tired alchemist that is trying to bring something back and has lost themselves to their research.

This piece went through several redrafts after getting some feedback and advice from my fellow artists and team mates. It had three major passes, the first being the most drastic for changes. The table was much longer there was less paper scattered and it looked much cleaner, it did however match my concept near. The second pass table being much stumpier, the stool was more stylised and paper and books cluttered the table leaving no space empty. The third pass had mostly lighting changing to allow shadows to been more instead of the light coming from straight on.

I kept the models simple and low poly, only trying to use edges that would affect the shape of the model but still had a stylised affect to it. This can be best seen in the candles, they're simple cylinder that I shunk the edgeloops to give them that exaggerated style. I also utlise alpha masks to all for the wax at the bottom of the candle to pile up underneath the candle to allow it to have transparent sections, this is also used for the quill.

Packing Uvs and textures was a skill I wanted to improve with this project, I managed to pack all the assets into 6 materials. Below are my Texture breakdown, some of them dont have a normal map due to the fact I was working purely in the low poly pipeline and the depth was added via the height texture instead.

With the paper assets, I would copy the other paper models but move the uvs around to have a varity of papers and notes to spread the table. This let me get that cluttered look with out having to made multiple textures for the paper.

As I try to improve my skills and abilities, I plan to add more to this series of work. This will allowin them to be a body of work that demonstrates my progress as an Artist and aid me to learn and improve new skills.