Eleventh Planet is an Augmented Reality AR experience in South Melbourne by artists John Power and Joanne Mott, that I had the pleasure of creating content for! It overlays a chrome sphere at the entrance of 11 Eastern Rd, South Melbourne and gives the experience of the gentle transformation of elemental and planetary states over vast spans of geological time: from their origins to the present and beyond.

This is a model of space ship that I created for the second planet in the experience. To make this I started with side, top and front 2D profile sketches of sections of the ship that I traced out in 3D.

It was important to have good edge flow and make sure and make sure that faces were made of 4 points and edges to allow for smoothing in the game engine.

Then I unwrapped the model and sent it off to John to be textured and put into the experience.

The next model I worked on is this 3D scan of a clay and paper model that John and crafted. I scanned this object with the Lidar scanner on my iPhone and optimised it in Blender.

Shown on the left is the result of the scan from my iPhone. I then optimised it through a process of retopology. This dramatically reduced the amount of faces on the model to a more suitable amount for rendering on a phone. Then I unwrapped it for normal and texture baking.

The process of normal baking was to create a texture image from the physical detail of the model to be used as a normal map instead. This way the number of faces is dramatically reduced while the physical details are kept.

The last thing I did was also bake the colour into the model from the scan and create a single material in Blender's shader editor to hold both the Normal map and Diffuse map. Then it was ready to ship off to John to be used in a future version of Eleventh Planet.