Maintaining My Skills
It was about April 2021 that I decided to model the original 1989 Nintendo GameBoy as bit of a personal project. The purpose was to exercise and maintain some of the skills I acquired during my BMW internship (and now employment at the Academy). Although completed in August last year, I want to take the time now to share this project and hopefully inspire you to do some 3D modelling.
I chose the 1989 Nintendo GameBoy as it was something a bit different – at least for me, anyway. Being a huge rev head I naturally gravitate towards car themed personal projects (for example: 2D vector art, car photography, and more recently 3D car models), so I decided now was the time to do something a little different. From the beginning I wanted to make some cool renders and force myself to practice important 3D modelling and visualisation skills that I have learnt in recent years.
I started by gathering a bunch of reference pictures – things that show scale, shape, textures and colours. I also found some very basic 2D line drawings of the GameBoy, which was enough to start with the overall size of the device and start modelling. After lots of pushing, pulling, cutting and manipulating faces within Blender, I had something that looked like the 1989 GameBoy. It took a few attempts at certain parts of the GameBoy to get it right – mostly because Blender doesn’t allow for parametric changes. This is where saving backups and different versions of your Blender models can be incredibly useful.
Once I finished the 3D modelling part of the project, I was able to move onto the visualisation phase. This involves separating and UV unwrapping each of the GameBoy parts, then texturing them. For the texturing and materials I used Adobe Substance 3D Painter. I also created all of the graphics that appear on the Gameboy and on the game cartridge in Adobe Illustrator (instead of using an image found online). This was so I could have a high resolution image for decals that matched the texture quality, but also because - why not make my own!
The really fun part of this project was creating the renders. I chose a magenta/cyan split lighting theme to create a 1980s style, while also being something quite bold, vibrant and engaging. Once a render scene was created with lights, I went about capturing different angles and details – something I thoroughly enjoy. I later added some Tetris shapes in the background to tie in with the game cartridge shown in the renders and the 1980s retro theme. I have some plans to make animations with the GameBoy to show different lighting transitions and a ‘shower’ of Tetris shapes raining down in the background – all for a bit of fun and to test my skills.
I hope you like the collection of renders I created during this project, and that this is some inspiration for you to either start modelling, or to keep going. I have a BMW car model nearing completion (are you surprised?) to share with you all in the near future, so keep an eye out for that.
Thanks for reading,
Jordan Domjahn
Design Associate