Top Hat 3d Model Production

The last model I made for this assignment was a top hat, shaped similarly to a fancy cap typically worn by magicians or rich gentlemen. I wanted to take another second attempt at creating an object made out of a cartoony fabric for this last creation, something that would fit right into a magical and kiddy PC or modern console game. The hat I make will be relatively high poly, as an unlockable hat you'll be able to obtain in a game. In this game there will be a 'trohpy' section where you can view high-poly and detailed models of various unlockable goodies, and this hat will be one of the trophies in this collection for the player to gaze at. After the armchair model I previously made took a more stylised and colourful turn that brought something different to my current list of models, I wanted to have another go at making a plush object.  But this time I'm using fabrics on a smaller scale which is much more manageable to plan out and add attention to detail to than a grand settee, plus the fabric on a top hat has a more silky and smooth look to it, which means I can add a glossy overlay to it compared to the very dull fabrics of before. My hat will also have a little bow attached to it (similar to a bow tie), so I'll collate some images of those two to get a good frame of reference for how it should look.



A hat I'm taking inspiration from, note the bow-tie on the side. (Village Hat Shop, 2016)




(i don't even own a television, 2015)


(Psd Graphics, 2016)


I began the model's production by creating a cylinder and used the connect and cut tools to create a square grid around the top of the shape. From there I curved it inwards at the top, moving each of the vertexes at a time to give the hat a more circular and bowl look to it giving the hat a very nice and bubbly appearance. From there I extruded the bottom segment of the hat and scaled it down to create the round circular base. After this I extruded out a ringed section of the hat's base, to create the look of a typical bow which wraps around the hat (as seen in the reference images, which I will texture white to give this a more traditional look for top hats).

From there I extruded in the bottom section of the hat, to create the hole someone would put their head into (or else the hat can't even be worn without falling off). I started off by selecting the entire bottom, moving it upwards, removing the vertices around the outside edge of the selection, moving those remaining vertexes up, etc. It helps create a nice, natural curve a head would fit right into. I also used the bend tool to give it a more crooked and 'wizardry' appearance, as the hat was starting to take shape with the bendy top. This is much more charismatic than just having a boring hat which extrudes right up into the air.

As a finishing touch I started to smooth out the edges (such as chamfering the top and bottom of the hat) to give the model a more smooth and natural shape, and also really exhibit some of the more intricate details like the hat's circular top which otherwise wouldn't be seen very well. I also added some mesh smooth modifiers to these parts, as it really smooths the shape's base out (as beforehand it was very noticeable that this hat only has 18 sides around the, and for example it's very intrusive in the hat's base in the images above as the circle looks very jagged). To add a big more 'wonkyness' to the shape which the mesh smooth removed, I then attached a FFD 4x4x4 modifier and used the custom control points to adjust different parts to slightly deform the shape in a stylised manner. Since the model at this point was looking quite featureless, I added two things to spice it up a bit. First is a wavy ribbon on the top using a very thin box with 10 width segments, each of which were individually moved and rotated to give this ribbon a natural flow, like it's being blown in the wind.

Next I created a bow which attaches onto the band wrapping around the hat which I made earlier, and I developed this bow using a technique with the cloth modifier. I first created a box with two more longer ones attached both sides (with one of the sides being a duplicate of the other with the symmetry tool). Afterwards I created the rough shape of a bow moving the polys, vertexes and edges of these boxes, and added a mesh smooth so it would fit in with the rest of the smoothed model. This mesh smooth also helped add more polys and edges to the bow, which works hand-in-hand with the cloth modifier I added afterwards. In the cloth modifier's settings I started with cotton as the default fabric, and changed various values to see what worked the best. I also used the round base below the bow as the physical ledge, so when I applied the settings to the model it dropped down and landed on the hat, merging into shape. Without this physical platform to rest on the bow just falls downwards infinitely into the abyss of 3ds Max (something I learned from when using the same technique to use the pillow for my sofa), so it's important that when applying these real-world cloth physics you keep in mind gravity is taken into effect.

Now it's time to texture the model! As I always do, I unwrapped all of the seperate parts individually, attached them all together and placed them into one UVW map, ready for texturing in Photoshop. For the hat's texture I started making my own type of fabric edited from an image, I coloured in the black sections of the hat first, and covered the hat's black areas with a stitched fabric texture on the layer above. From here I set the layer to multiply and applied a clipping mask in order to crop the stitching and wrap it around the hat's black colour. These various materials fit the top hat's design well, and my choice of having a purple colour scheme for the bow and ribbon I feel compliments the black hat well.



Peer feedback: After asking Rob what he thought on the unwrapped hat shown above in person, he suggested to remove some of the unneeded edges and to lower the poly-count slightly. Likewise he thought it would be a good idea to curve out the base upwards, in order to give the base a more natural and less rounded tone.

Ben Musgrave: "It looks alright. It's very high-poly, as Rob said remove some of the uneeded edges. The bow's really nice though. The hat isn't very hat-like as it has nowhere for the head to go, but that may just be the texture as a hole's definitely there."

Jason Wood: "It's very nice I like it, it looks like a hat,  couldn't really fault it. Good job! The hat is my favourite model of yours."

Marshall Humberstone: "A well detailed object that manages to show the artist's style through just the base model and lends itself to their texturing capabilities."

To conclude this journey I feel I've made a very nice looking hat which has a better fabric texture than my sofa. I took on-board some of the advice given, such as me removing unnecessary polys, I used CTRL + Backspace to remove edges which didn't contribute much to the model's shape and just served to bump up the poly count, usually created by the mesh smooth modifiers. I managed to reduce my poly count from 7000 to around 4000, still leaving the model to be highly detailed perfect for a game's gallery, while still trimming off the dead weight. I really enjoy the simplicity of this model, and it fits a very stylised look while also having a an element of realism with the fabric, something I was previously unable to achieve with my chair. If I were to go back and do this again, I'd definitely consider poly count as an important factor more in the creation process, as hats don't need to be highly sculpted to still look good. Regardless I'm still proud of what I've accomplished over these past few months with my 5 models, and my personal development as I improved and learned really shows with the increase of quality for my models from the start to finish, comparing my Pippy Bird and Treasure Chest for example.

As always I've uploaded this model to Sketchfab where it can be publicly viewed in a rendered environment: https://skfb.ly/MVvp