An early thought about the island was to have it chained
down, it adds an allure of mysticism to have giant chains heading down into the
abyss, never knowing how the chains were placed there nor where they go. This
meant working out how to do them, initially the chains were just made from
Torus’ scaled to make a chain segment then the piece was copied, rotated and
placed as the next link. Repeating the copy multiple times could give any
length of chain desired.
Although this basic chain would have met the design desired
and been perfectly functional, I sought something more to the chains, although
initially I couldn’t quite work out what. Whilst still trying to work out the
chain design I ended up experiencing a newly redesigned map for a game called
Smite. Within the new map chains holding hounds of Hel were present and other
chains heading off into the sky were also around. This chain design leapt out
as incredible and I thought I would have a go at replicating the chain in order
to use it for our island.
The first thing was to work out the shape needed, this was
relatively simple as it was a case of just drawing up a 2D image of the chains
front and side from the 3D footage I had taken as reference material. Once the
2D images were complete I was able to use my Corel Draw skills to draw up the
lines needed, in order to transfer them into 3Ds Max as splines. With the
spline I tried multiple different ways to make them 3D unfortunately a lot of
these attempts failed. A simple extrude wasn’t enough as it made a very square
chain and it looked ghastly. Trying to move the centre also proved tricky as it
never really connected to the outer edge making manipulation equate to
overlapping planes. Eventually I ended up just moving individual points up and
down in order to get a nice angled shape. Once that had been done symmetry was
put in place so that the other side matched up and finally the chain piece came
together and looked rather good, being fairly accurate to the original source.
As a little extra and suitable justification for the chains
to be attached to the island a small spike was crafted that would go through
the end chain nearest the island and look as though it was jabbing into the
underside of the island.
When the chain was complete, each piece copied into its
appropriate place, it was decided that a little motion in the chains would make
them look more dynamic and as if they were swaying in the winds surrounding the
island. In order to get this motion I utilised bones and thus the skin
modifier. The bones were simply laid out to match the position of the chain
then with all the chain links having been attached to make a single object a
skin modifier was put onto them. With the bones now controlling the movement of
the chain, I auto-keyed a simple waving motion which unfortunately proved too
wavy, and looked unnatural. My second attempt I kept more minimal for the
motion and it looked a lot better. Once that motion was complete I created a
second boned chain and performed a similar auto-key to that. With two chains
complete and four desired I chose to utilise a symmetry modifier in order to
make the task easier and quicker.
A video displaying the original source of the chain design and my own attempt:
A video displaying the original source of the chain design and my own attempt:
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| The original chain, functional, acceptable...just a bit meh... |
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| Drawn up in Corel Draw the initial chain shape was created |
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| With the right amount of fiddling the chain took shape and provided a unique (albeit unique to Smite) look to the chains |
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