A Treaure Chest of Sorts

Today I had a go at creating a chest, with the intention of playing around with objects and modifiers, learning how to produce higher quality models and textures. First of all I created a room using 5 planes (one for each wall and a floor) and mapped them with a dirt texture. I used additional bump to give it more depth and added some standard omni lights with shadows enabled to set the scene some more. My first attempt at creating the chest was a failure; I started with a box shape and used the cut tool to add edges and then deleted the inside of the box, to make it look like an empty box. I duplicated this box and flipped it around and manipulated it to create the shape of the top of a chest, rotating it so it looked like the chest was slightly open and you could see inside. When I rendered this, you could see through to the plane underneath the chest and also through the top of of the chest, and I assume that this was because I deleted the polygons inside the box. So I started again, this time using planes to create a box shape, which gave me the same outcome visually except it uses more shapes in total. I connected all of them together using the connect tool and cloned it again to create the top of the chest. After getting a good result I decided to try and hinge the two parts of the box together, so that it moved on an axis at the back of the chest, so that it actually opened and closed, however this proved too difficult to achieve so I decided to leave it out and keep the images as two static boxes.

Playing around with the material editor enabled me to create a silver material to use on my chest, and also a glass texture to allow people to see into the chest. The creation of the glass texture was accidental, however it's a useful thing to know and it will help me in future projects. I used the UVW Map modifier to scale down the maps on all objects, making them look more realistic and giving them more depth.

After getting a result that I was happy with, I decided to create some coins on the inside of the chest so that it wasn't just an empty chest. The coins were made using the cylinder tool, and extruding one of the edges slightly to give it more depth. I then added a texture to it, used the UVW Map modifer to scale it down and cloned it many times so the bottom of the chest was littered with coins.

I think that I could use this chest design in my final project, if I adapt it to the scene and edit it so that it fits in. I think I could use it to hold the crossbow bolts for my crossbow, or just use it as an object in the background.