Flashlight research and design – 3D Modelling

*Game – lucid dreams*

Introduction – In this post I am going to be researching different types of flashlights and which one I best think would fit the requirements of lucid dreams (The game I’m making).

Sections
– Types of flashlights
– Designing round the concept
– The Design!?
– Materials!?

I probably didn’t need to go into so much detail but I was having fun going in depth and i’m glad i did because it expanded my ideas on a flashlight, such as headlamp and lantern. What I was thinking before i did some research was a simple like example 5. However because of the concept of the player being in a lucid dream I’m going to keep the design simple but with a few tweaks to make it unique.

Designing round the concept –
The player is in a lucid dream using a flashlight going round and exercising all of the ghosts. Dreams will run off what you have seen in life and the design should be based round that so a simple flashlight will be effective for the player.

The design!?
I’ve decided that I’m going to use the reference 5 and 9 to base my idea round. I feel like this keeps faithful to my concept.

1) Ref 5 – keep a simple basic design of a torchlight so it easily recognizable by player

2) Ref 9 – I really liked the lighting details of the torch so I’m going to add that to the base of the flashlight.

When i drew this out i was basing the idea of the link to reference image five from the types of flashlight table

Firstly, I’m going to ignore the colours I was going to make it with but I still want to break the mapping of the model into Main, Trim and light. This makes it easier for me to map once I’ve created it. I’m going to keep the colours simple:
Main – black
Trim – Grey
Light – yellow light (like a normal light bulb)

Front – I wanted to reduce the polygons and get the effect of it still having a round shape like a flashlight without deforming it too much. So I’m trying to create it in a way where it has triangulation, that is why it has the triangle pattern. I don’t want the front of the flashlight to be flat so i’m going chafer the edge and extrude the middle face in a little bit so it looks more realistic.

Side view – I want to raise the faces round the edge lantern to break up the body of the flashlight to highlight where the handle of the flashlight is and give more structure to the model.

Back – The back part will just have a raised trim like the faces round the lantern part of the body.

Dimensions –

Dimensions taken from link below

Flashlight I’m basing my dimensions round

Link to flashlight inspiration – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flashlight-8000Lumens-8700mAh-Rechargeable-Spotlight/dp/B00C3A5SIO

Materials!?
Even though the example I am using to make the model uses steel, i want to give my flashlight a plastic texture and the light material a corrugated plastic. I’m going still going to break them into three categories trim, main and light

Light (for lantern part and front face)-

Bump Map (Bump map gives the effect that the material is raised and not just flat)

link to materials used – https://opengameart.org/content/plastic-batch-of-9-seamless-textures-with-normalmaps

Main and trim –

I’m going to use the same material that ill use for the main but change it to more grey colour for the trim by effecting the diffuse colour in 3DS Max.