Pokeball Machine

 The Creation of the Pokeball Machine

Recently i finished playing Pokeemon Violet and during my playthrough I was intrigued by the the idea of creating an asset for the game. I started doing some reaserces and I stumbled across the Pokemon Lab, in particular the machine that stored the pokeballs.

The original Pokeball machine was just placed as decoration, the 3 starters were placed in the desk and ready to be chosen by the player.

The Remake Machine from the first game has 5 Pokeball inside a glass container, protected by a password system. 

I want to create a simple model to represent the feeling of choosing your first started from the Pokemon franchise. First I need to work on the base model. My workflow will start with Maya.

The first thing to create is a 3D Pokeball, I previously worked on this particular model, so I will recreate something similar.

Once our main focused point is created, we need to make the base of the Machine. thankfully they are simple geometry, cylinders will do the trick. I will not create more Pokeballs, because they are sharing the same textures for this particular model.

Once the base is completed, I will work on creating the remaining components. These are all the main parts that must be UV mapped correectly.

One thing to make sure, is that the model must not be to complex and the faces must not distort too much from the original once we move to the high poly version, the best way to check the distortion is to press 3 and then create edges to support the structure.

Once the supporting edges are added, we can add a new material, call this m_pokeball_machine for a easy reference point. then we can move to UV mapping the model, I like to have all the uv maps in the same layer for this particular model.

We also need to create the Mirror, to do this is just simple cylinder around the edges. the mirror will have a different material, called m_mirror but for this model I will leave the uv maps in the same layer.

It is important to make sure that the UV have enaugh space between them, because we are going to bake a high poly model into them. For the Pokeball and the models that are similar is okay to place the UV in the same position in the layer.

I will then duplicate the Pokeball and the other corresponding models around the main Object, the UV maps will remain in the same position.

Now we need to rename correctly each component and group them. this will allow it to bake the models correctly in substance painter. 

Now we can move to work on the high Poly version. This part is tricky, we need to add smoothing surfaces but we also have to make sure that the model stay close as possible to the original, with Maya we can use the smoothing tool to add more faces and this will make the models more smooth and clean, thanks to the supporting edges we added previously the model will not deform.

Then, just like the low poly we have to rename correctly each components and we have to make sure that both models are in the same exact position to be baked correctly.

Once everything is done we can export both model as group, making sure each component is not hidden, then we can import the low poly model in Substance 3D painter and start the baking process

The baking process is very straightforward, when done correctly we should have a clean model with no issues.

Next I worked on making sure the glass was transparent, to do this I added the glass material and customized the opacity parameter to make sure it was see trough.

Now I can Proceed on texturing the Model. This process is left to once artistic talents, as texturing a Pokeball doesn't require particular knowledges. The rest of the machines are block colour stylized with small scratches and effects to make them results thanks to the baking and I also added an image to the screen in the machine for a interesting design.

The machine now is ready to be exported to Unreal Engine 5, but in this case I will instead export the model to my Sketchfab to showcase it.

My model is available here.