Chess Pieces

A chess game might be a tad more exciting if there are actually chess pieces to play with. Sadly, I wasn't allowed to use the living chess pieces which actually fight eachother (As per the rules of Marsian Chess) - So we have to put up with the generic model.

I found this handy reference photo online to work from (Alas, I only possess a Travel Chess set, which has a pathetic collection of cheap plastic models). And it's times like this that I thank God for 3DS Max's 'Clone' option. Creating 16 identical pawns would have been soul-destroying.

Starting life as a cylinder, the pawn model was literally built from the ground up. In order to create a smoothness and consistency in the mesh: I created a cylinder and constantly extruded the top face (Using Bevel, so that I had the additional control over width) upwards, changing the radius to create the trims and curves. The model was blasted with turbosmooth and finished off with a sphere on top.

Whoever thought that the Knight chess piece should be a horse needs a stern talking to. This model was easily one of the more nasty ones to create, particularly as it was important for me to try and build everything from the original mesh. The forward-curve of the Knight leaning was simply achieved by pushing the central section forward (Turbosmooth took care of the rest). The head took several attempts. In the end, the 'neck' of the knight was angled forward, so that the next extrusion would angle forward (As you can see from the back-section of the knight's head). The nose was then extruded from the front of the head mesh (Where everything else was extruded from the top). The small details of the ears and mane were created by trial-and-error with pulling out certain vertices and edges.

The bishop was created very much like the pawn was. The only difference here is that it's taller and has the tell-tale cut in the side of the top. Whilst I tried to create this by pulling the vertices around, the original shape of the 'dome' made it very difficult to get the right angle. In the end, I Used Pro-Boolean to achieve the cut. After all, it's a tiny piece that will get very little focus during the end result... the time saved outweighed the slightly bigger file size and processor requirement.

Unlike the Bishop, the grooves in the rook were able to be achieved by pulling the vertices around. The angle of the grooves followed the contours and edges of the mesh nicely, so adding the grooves did not require a major overhaul of the mesh. The battlements were also emphasised by pushing the centre sections of the top down, creating the 'cup-like' shape of the top.

The Queen essentially followed the same procedure as the rook. The 'frills' of the crown were made by pushing every other vertex down (Creating the zig-zag style). The central crown and tip were both spheres added on top.

The King, the most important piece of all... and ridiculously tall. Unfortunately, I was unable to create a good-looking cross from the original mesh (The turbosmooth continually warped the cross so it looked like a deformed piece of alphabetti spaghetti), so I confess... I cheated and built it from a cube, and then just stuck it on top.