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| The toy was finally discontinued in the early 1990s. |
Essentially a music box, the interchangeable discs have small notches which trigger one of a number of small 'needles' in the playing arm. Each disc plays a different nursery rhyme or popular song, such as Humpty Dumpy, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Camptown Races.
If this sounds familiar it's because I posted last month about a man who had developed his own system for 3D printing plastic discs for the player.
3D model: disc
This was one of the models produced for Phase 2 of my game project, so my plan was to create a basic model which looked enough like the real thing to trigger memories, but I wasn't too bothered with accuracy or detail, or optimising the model.
I intended the plastic disc to work in a standalone capacity (i.e. loose obstacles on the floor) so I started with this.
After creating a low-poly mesh as my main model, I subdivided and extruded faces to create a high-poly version of the disc with raised rings; after adding small notches I baked this (within Maya) to the low-poly model to create a basic normal map for the disc.
This turned out badly, so I ended up colouring the raised edges and creating a manual normal map by fiddling with embossing and colour channels on Photoshop. This didn't quite emphasise the rings enough, so I added a subtle diffuse map to add detail when combined with the normal map.
With a bit of simple lighting, the final disc looks fair enough.
3D Model: record player
The main part of the record player was fairly straightforward. The yellow plastic playing arm and knobs were added as separate components so they can be manipulated by the game engine to simulate the actions of the toy.
The disc was then added, plus a diffuse map texture to make it look a little more like the real deal.
Finally, a very simple normal map (again, created manually on Photoshop) to add ridges to the inside rear section.
Not bad for 600 triangles. I could probably bring this down with a bit of extra work but it's OK for a basic model for Phase 2 of my project. I may re-visit it in more detail at some point in the future.