Week 7 - Village Blacksmith House & Gurus Texturing Project

Village House – Blacksmith

This week I began the Village House Project, for which I had the choice of designing one of many types of houses. The requirements were to design a stylised house (which would fit within the village), with hand drawn textures and it needed to modelled using a maximum of 5000 triangles. For that reason I was given a style guide to follow through the whole project. My house needed to be textured using 4 tiling 512x512pixel, 24bit Targa’s for the tiled sections of the building. For any other unique elements I had an additional 1024x1024pixel, 32bit Targa with an alpha channel. Also to add, we were put into teams of 10, to then decide on who would work on which house. After we voted, I was happy to find out that I ended up with my first choice, which was the blacksmith’s house. I knew this one would be a good challenge, as I’d have to model many props, such as tools and an anvil to give it the right appearance.

My mood-board containing various images related to my project as well as my photographs from the guildhall.

I needed to have a very good understanding of the structure of such buildings, especially since my ideas need to look convincing, stylised and at the same time, functional. Other houses in the virual village featured exaggerated proportions like: thick wooden beams, oversized/tilted chimneys and also warped sections including large-than-normal roofs. The short talks given my one of my lecturers were a big help during one of my guildhall visits. He helped me better understand a few details that I may not have noticed before, such as the reason behind the deformation of the walls and how the beams in walls were not just there for their function, but also to improve the overall appearance of the building.

I began by capturing a few screenshots from the village in Unreal Engine, these would help me understand the area, foundations and terrain in which my building will need to placed.

Then I started practicing photo bashing of different house ideas, in Photoshop CC. For this process I used a house pieces kit, which I’ve previously made from photographs of Tudor houses and structures. This process of design helped me produce fairly detailed outcomes, but it proved to be very time consuming. It took me too long to combine the house pieces and align them correctly. I ended up moving onto silhouettes fairly quickly instead.

The green space under each silhouette is a rough shape of the Blacksmith's houses foundation.

Drawing silhouettes proved to be the better choice, as I produced way more ideas with sufficient amounts of detail. They were just as usable, as the photo bashed ideas and took me less time to produce. I should have used photo bashing to develop my ideas/silhouettes. Due to not having enough time at that point, I decided to partly skip photo bashing and have moved onto developing and refining my ideas instead.

Eventually I asked for some critique from my group, I thought I’d strongly benefit from finding out which ideas they find to be the strongest, if any. It turned out that I needed to try and use sections from a couple of my design ideas to produce my concept. Neither of my designs seemed good or strong enough to work from alone. So I made the decision to pick a few of the most successful ideas and I plan to merge their best features when I start developing my concept. I would still have an opportunity to add any necessary changes/adjustments when I start concepting and modelling. Therefore I didn’t feel that I needed to go back to my silhouettes and rework them completely.

Texturing Project – Plant pot

There was another project I worked on as well during the week. It was a texturing project for my Gurus and Grasshoppers. My Gurus in the 3^rd year had given me a model of a plan in a pot and my job was to unwrap and texture it. The most important part though, was to make a texture that also had an alpha channel for the plant’s leaves. I have decided to hand draw this texture and already have made some progress on it. The reason being that I still lacked experience in digital painting; I found this to be a good way to practice along with my village house’s textures.

I have made some progress on the pot's texture, I still need to add more detail to the leaf and its stem.

To make the most of my texture space (1024x1024 32bit Targa), I unwrapped the leaves onto the same area and layered them on top of each other to use the same space. Although these leaves will look the same, it was still beneficial, as this technique allowed me to have a larger area to draw my details on. I wasn’t aiming for a realistic appearance, so the identical looking leaves didn't seem like a bad choice for me.