Making a Traveling Secretary Box
One day my parents and I were cleaning up some old things and we came across this strange box I had never seen before. I have such a soft spot in my heart for antiques and immediately fell in love with it. I had never seen such a thing before and yet it looked loved and taken care of. After a long internet search, I found that it was called a traveling secretary box which was made around the 1850's. These were little desks that gentleman would carry with them, this particular one wasn't anything special though. With such a cool find I wanted to remake it, the mirror especially was something I wanted to try my hand at.
Of course the first thing I needed to do was take some reference pictures. After taking a closer look at the little lids, the three wooden lids seemed to be replacements and the one with the green leather was an original.
Modeling and UV's
The model itself was pretty straight forward, same with the uvs. For the sake of keeping some similar textures together, I used udims.
Texturing
I went about the textures in a couple of different ways: using Photoshop, Substance Designer, and Substance Painter. I couldn't get the wood texture to look the way I wanted to through Designer, so I ended up taking a photo of a dark stained wood, brought it into Photoshop to make it tileable. From that, I could make both a roughness and normal map from it. I did the same thing for the velvet.
Color
Roughness
Normal
Height
For the little leather lids, I made a really simple procedural material in Designer.
The real fun came in when I brought this into Substance Painter. A lot of the materials were pretty straight forward, plug this in, put that there, add some grunge. The best part was trying to figure out how to make the mirror look antique. I made a series of different layers, each with different variations of roughness and metallicity. Then it was a matter of adding some dust, grime, and fingerprints.
Finished!
This was honestly such a fun project to work on. The mirror itself was a really fun challenge, mainly because I didn't want to go overboard with it. By far, the most satisfying part of this project was to have the box next to me as I worked.
