Highly detailed phones

With the missile pretty much completed i started on the most complex of the 3 assets - the phone.

I found a tutorial online to follow which can be found here: Phone tutorial 
This tutorial has over 140 steps but i decided early on due to not being able to spend so much time on the phone that i would omit some of the steps such as applying the camera detail on the back which wouldnt be seen.

The phone originally started as a box that was 10cm x 5.4cm x 0.5cm, i wanted to keep to the real world scale as this would save me resizing the model at a later date.

It looks so tiny in the perspective viewport, this was as far in as it was possible to zoom in on the phone.
The main modifiers that where used in this model were extrude, champher and inset which meant that i could shape the edges into a more rounded phone. These techniques were used to great extent on one of the main features - the main button which had been inset, extruded and champhered so many times that the polygon count whent through the roof. This was not going to be an asset that was able to be used in a game engine, far too memory hungry for that, purely pre-rendered fmv for this asset.

Thats a lot of polygons!!!

The button was originally a spline circle that was placed on the front of the box and then extruded slightly and then cut into the box to give me a single polygon from which i could do all of the stepd to create the final button.

The screen was a very nice section, it was one polygon inse from the main front of the box and given rounded edges, this polygon was then selected and cloned 2 more times so in fact the screen is 3 seperate parts pushed so tightly together so that i could create a display screen, a border screen and the front glass screen to reflect the light. To work on just the screens i learnt a really good set of features, using the 'H' key to select the 3 polygons of the screen i could then prest alt and 'Q' to move into isolation mode - this hid the rest of the screne and let me work on the three polygons to get the perfect. Below you can see an exploded view of the screen:

The effect once these polygons are sandwiched together in the phone is great and very realistic. I had used a simple tutorial to get the glass texture and the screen was from a search on google, the screen is an iphone one not a htc, thats the only thing about the phone that isnt 'real'.

With all the textures in place and the phone finished to a usuable extent - this took about 10 hours in total i was able to light the phone and place it onto a simple plane with wood texture, as you can see here with the final version:

The most annoying thing was that i had somehow managed to slightly move the front polygon a fraction to the right which has given it a slight lopsided appearance, need to be more careful next time.