Architecture project

For my architecture project i made a old banks pub which was i go past everyday on my way home and thought of doing it as a project, it was very exciting making a building which i never did before; i also followed the brief as it said it has to be old and interesting. Which it definitely was and i was very happy for that. Moving on from it was my first time making tillable textures and after many attempts on trying to make it flawlessly tillable i actually did; it obviously had errors there and there however i did my best to get it just right and represent the exact building in real life.

following all the necessary precautions such as the tri count and the texture limit i think i did a good job and it looked very alike the actual building; im very proud of the my project, learning lots new and great techniques.

Van

 To start, this project was very interesting as in actually get to make a vehicle for a game. Having played several racing games I wanted to see the work put to making virtual cars. The brief indicated to get individual reference for a ford transit, being a very dull car to model I was still very thrilled. The reference is mainly used for the textures because the vehicle has specified dimension that you can’t model from pictures because of perspective and distortion. We were allowed to get the dimensions / orthographic from the internet.

However I encountered issues as all the images I got couldn't line up for the vehicle I was doing, I didn't want to change it because I had a lot of photos taken of the specific van I wanted to model which was the ford transit short wheel base 2012.

(The reference image)

Despite it looking perfect, I tried all I can to make it line up so I can model it easily however it was not possible due the guy that actually made it resized different proportions from the front.

However the pictures for textures I got was pleasing and indeed very helpful – (found in the reference images folder). Looking at them you can see that the majority of the photos are not the vehicle I’m doing however in terms of texture and parts its identical to the vehicle I want to do. So the compromise is ok.

Moving on to the first stages of modelling the reference image did line up; barely but it did. I assured myself and continued to model. Getting the box model done and blocking the main shape and not focusing on the detail was my main priority because detail can be added later by either adding more polygons or through normal maps. However I choose to do it through geometry which was a big mistake.

Doing that my typology got ruined however as there was other projects that needed to be done time drew nearer and I keep forgetting where the problem was and continued to model. Finishing the modelling stage the UV’s told me where all the problems were, so in my opinion I was fixing more than actually progressing my work. Eventually I finished it but still had a few problems with it that didn't fix.

Some triangles and some other parts that couldn't be linked because Max didn't want to. Another way I checked for mesh errors is using mud box, it tells me what errors there are and where they are on my model. Very convenient for last point check-up’s.

I use mud box when I finish modelling and go into UV’s because then I have a chance for making my UV phase fast and easier without worrying about typology, if I use mud box after UV-ing I have to recreate the UV for part of the mesh which was incorrect. A very bad approach.

This is telling me what the problem is with a description; for a newbie like me this is very knowledgeable information. If my mesh is 100% correct which 90% chance of it not being. It will go straight through without error messages.

The red dots indicate where the errors are, so I can look and go back and check them. I use this technique in my workflow every time.

UV’s being done I go into texturing which is I believe harder than modelling because achieving realism is hard without proper textures, my pictures for textures had a lot of lighting problems and as for being a vehicle it was obvious. I wanted to at least get the base texture of the van right. After many tries fiddling with colors around pure white I choose a white bluish tone for my base color because I think it matched it perfectly.

After that the texturing was fairly straight forward and I was able to do them without any pressure using marmoset tool bag as a live renderer as it updates every time I re-save over my old texture I can visually see what I’m doing right and what needs to be done. Again very useful tool.

Overall I think I didn't get time for this project because of the two week projects I had between them plus other projects from visual design, time keeping in nearly impossible due to the amount of work from different areas. However I will try to do my best and give as much time as I can to the next 3D project. Focusing on mainly time keeping.