2000s Nostalgia
Cinema4D Illustrator Photoshop
3d-Modeling Optimized Topology
Project Description
To practice my polygon modeling skills I created a ‘retro’ game controller. I wanted to express the strong nostalgia I have for being 7 or 8 years old, sitting in the living room playing my new Nintendo Wii. My favorite show at the time, roughly 2007, was Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel so I added the sticker just like when I brought my Wii over to a sleepover and had to distinguish my controllers from my friends.
I still have my Wii and love to go back and play some of my old favorites. Video games played a big part in my childhood and friendships both then and now. My dream today is to work as a 3d artist helping to make video games, both as a career and with my game-dev friends on the weekends.
My Process
I created this model by blocking out the main shapes with a rectangle, adding some edge loops, and extruding faces in and out. I love organizing the edge loops and polygons on models and prefer polygon-modeling to sculpting, although topologizing sculpts is fun too.
After the main block out I created parametric objects with primitive shapes like the cylinder to create the buttons. For the directional pad and the B-button I used a deformer to bend the edges outward. I was constantly referring to my reference image in the front and side viewports to check the proportions and locations of everything. Once I was happy with the location of the buttons I added supporting edge loops and faces on the model around where the holes would be, then after adding the extra polygon divisions I deleted the center-most faces of each hole and adjusted the shape to fit nicely around the buttons.
For the icons I took my picture of a Wii remote into illustrator to create shapes that I could later import into cinema4D as shapes and splines to extrude into the stickers for each button. For the sticker I was able to apply it as a texture with a transparent background (using an alpha mask) so it would appear over my other applied materials. Most of the materials for this model were very simple matte redshift materials. The only ones that stand out beyond the classic white of the Wii is the sensor and the slightly transparent A-button.
