I’ve been busy in between this post and my last submission. I began work on a model for an AK-47 following a tutorial series on YouTube, this is still a work in progress and so will be posted at a later date with a complete project. In the meantime, I began work on one of the assets I want to showcase for a project. Because of this, I used all of the methods I had previously learnt for the item such as extrusions and booleans. I thought about recurring themes in post-apocalyptic texts and thought about how in most texts characters use make-shift items, combining items to make weapons or enhancing existing tools with additional ‘pain-inflicters’.
I liked the look of these items, they say a lot about the character and their preferred method of fighting. Melee weapons are typically favoured in games as they use no ammo and rely purely on the strength and energy of the characters. In an apocalyptic scenario, food would be scarce and so to resort to melee weapons would be a last-ditch effort for the truly desperate. I considered a baseball bat but thought it would be somewhat fruitless to make a prop already so common in video games. I considered other melee weapons that would be common especially in a world covered in vegetation. I thought of a woodcutting axe. I liked the idea of this as I thought that in a post-apocalyptic setting, the wood would have a more natural shape to it whereas the axe head might have been salvaged or re-used. I wanted the axe to have a multi-purpose and so thought about enhancing the axe with some nails through it, poorly added so will have bends and shape to them. To reflect on the item being makeshift, I bent the nails out of shape trying to add a bit of variety to the way they pass through the handle. Making an axe futuristic was a bit of an odd thought, in order to accomplish this, I added micro details such as the branding including the establishment date of the company being in the future. 
To get the twist of the bolt, I used a deformer with extrusions on the long faces of the bolt to give it the thread, this was a new skill that I learnt to complete the project. With the axe model complete, I began a UV mapping process, this involves plotting all of the shapes in a two-dimensional space and making sure every item has enough space around it for textures and detail to be added. This took a while as I went through and did each part of the item individually to get it right and make give the items a good resolution. This was the most time-consuming part of the construction of the axe as unfolding the handle would often crash the programme and so I’d have to find a workaround. Eventually, though, every item had its own UV map for textures to be applied.
Following this, I could take the item into Substance Painter where I could continue to explore storytelling in 3D modelling and prop design. In a humid environment, the metal properties will have rust and become weakened by the environment, because of this I added different rust textures to all of the metal parts also considering the base metal they would have been made of, the axe head being made from steel, the iron nails and glossy steel bolt. I added blood to the axe head to show it as being a weapon used. With the textures done, I could export them back to Maya and export the final project with the textures added.
