How it was made: Lamp Model

Hello everyone! For this devlog, I’ll be walking you through the creation of a simple lamp model for the subLiminal game!

The first model I wanted to work on was a lamp for the later levels. I had an image of the type of one I wanted that I found online, but the lamp being a tall object, the picture had to be taken from far away and didn’t give much detail.

Starting off with a cylinder, I increased the subdivisions along the axis, and then made the caps into quads. Stretching the entire cylinder vertically, I began to work on the top of the lamp. Scaling the top face down with an extrusion, I gave the metal part of the lamp a lip to bevel later on before the glass part started. I wanted the top of the lamp to look sort of bowl-ish, so using the orthogonal views, I scaled the individual edge loops until it looked round and smooth. 

Again I scaled the top face with an extrusion, before pushing it down to empty out the center for the lightbulb. Hiding half the model and turning on symmetry along the axis that I hid it against, I was able to see the insides and make the inner walls match the outer ones. With the top’s rough shape finished, I moved to the bottom, to create the very simple base of the lamp. Wanting to have a smoother and more mathematical curve here, I simply scale-extruded the base outward, then used a bevel. 

With the basic shape of the model done, I pulled in the image to get the final scale of the lamp correct. I didn’t have a person in the software, so it was difficult to tell if the lamp was too tall, too thin, or too short. Seeing how well my lamp lined up with the image, I finalized the model by beveling some extra spots, and messing with the normals to make it look smooth and soft in certain areas. With the model of the lamp finished, I quickly UVed it, the simple cylindrical shape of it made most of it automated using the cylinder UV tool. With all that done, the final step was to align the model’s pivot for easy placement in-game! I turned on vertex snapping, and put the pivot to the center-most bottom vertex on the lamp’s base.

And with that, we have our finished and UV'ed lamp model!