Iván Batalla, a young 3D Artist from northern Spain, discussed his latest model – the Gateway Galaxy from Nintendo’s game “Super Mario Galaxy”.
The most useful tool while modeling the planets was the LoopTools addon. For example, the holes of the hollow planet were made deleting random faces and using that addon to smooth the edges. The green ovals of the Egg Planet and the stones from the Initial world were made in the same way, smoothing the original geometry with LoopTools to make circular shapes directly on the surface. I also beveled some of the edges between grass and stone and scaled them a little bit to the inside to add some depth.
The main planet had more details on it than the others, so it was the longest one. The bridge was made with just one unit repeated with an array modifier and rounded with a curve modifier and a bezier curve. I used metaballs and a remesh modifier to make the tree, and they were new tools that I had never used before.
Iván Batalla
The artist also discussed the texturing part. He states it was the easiest part. He created multiple materials for each planet, and added them to the proper faces. Then he did a temporary UV unwrap, added one texture per material, and fixed the UV lands to match texture’s size with the object’s scale without worrying about overlapping them and other issues.
Iván Batalla
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