VSFX 768 - Photo-realistic Modeling

CG Hard Surface Model - Musical Instrument - "The Bridal Harp"

Special Thanks:
Many thanks to the original designers and builders of the harp, Camille and Henry Cole. Their website can be found here.

Project Summary:
Using polygons, create a model of a musical instrument. Emphasis should be on reliable photo references and generating the surface via modeling instead of bump or displacement maps, except where they make more sense.

Results:
Click on the image to the right to see a turntable of the finished model.

Wireframe

In contrast to the watch I used a smoothing workflow for all the major parts of the harp. The horn, legs, and particularly the neck were modeled very low poly and then converted to a 2-recursion smooth mesh. UVing was done on the low-poly mesh and then carried over after the smooth. The neck is a series of extrusions to a poly cube. The horn began as a small NURBS cylinder that was animated along a path, scaling up towards the end. I used an animation snapshot to capture the steps at regular intervals and then extruded them together to form the basic shape. This was then converted to polys for the detailing and reshaping. The strings and their fittings remain simple poly shapes without the need for smoothing.

Texture, Lighting and Renders

Color and bumps maps provide textures for the wood portions and horn. The fittings are simple shaders. In the future I would like to return to the horn itself and explore adding SSS to it to enhance the "seashell" feel that it has.