Week 8 - Bradgate Park Studies, Village Blacksmith House & Gurus Project

Village House - Blacksmith

During this week I had began working on my concept, as well as modeling my blacksmith house. When it came to modeling, I focused mainly on using vertex and polygon selection for shaping my building. This wasn't the fastest way to model it, but I went with it, as I was fairly confident in using these tools. It was important for me to finish by the deadline, so I needed to make the right decisions, to save more time for any necessary corrections at the end.

One of the first changes I applied was a new side roof, as the hood shaped one (shown on the smaller black silhouette) was too complex and didn't seem to fit my idea when I tried to model it. As I worked on my concept and modeled the base section of it, I noticed that it wasn’t very functional or space efficient, so I've decided to change the base of the building. I used another base, from one of my previous ideas and merged it with the top section of this one. This meant, that the door was basically pushed back further, to allow more walking space on the bottom. This gave it more of a workshop appearance, just like I wanted. 

The first image of my model's progress shows an experiment I did by painting over as render of it. I was interested whether I could add an additional section/room just above the entry area (where I planned to add stairs). I scrapped this idea, as it overcomplicated the buildings structure, making it appear too busy and detailed. I wanted to keep it looking simple and clear to understand.

Following the triangle count limit was tricky, as I wanted to only model a section of my house. Then texture it and clone the sections to fill in the empty parts. The problem was that I had to calculate how many triangles that may require, ahead of making my building to prevent going over the triangle limit. 

Unwrapping was fairly simple due to using tillable textures, although it was fairly problematic when I moved onto the wooden beams and the unique elements. They took me a lot longer than expected. Even making them in low triangle count didn’t help much when it came to unwrapping.

Tiled Textures

Unique Elements Texture

exture

I tested the textures on my model while I was making them, to make sure they tile correctly, then I added any necessary colour or pattern changes when necessary. This way I prevented my textures from looking out of place too much.

Texturing Project - Plant pot

Eventually I completed the remaining areas of my texture from last week, such as the leaf and its stem. Since it was already unwrapped, all I had left to do was to apply my texture and check for any mistakes or visible seams. The leaves turned out much better than expected, they looked lively and the texture presented clearly.

The only thing I would have corrected here, was the pot's texture, as I only painted a simple pattern onto it, whereas I could have done much more about it. For example, I could have added scratch marks or cracks on the edges, maybe even areas of scratched off paint to make it look older.

Bradgate Park Trip

Just like I mentioned in my previous posts, I wanted to focus more on improving my digital painting skills. So during my visit to this park, I tried to spend most of my time on looking for interesting spots, which I photographed and sketched quickly to help myself understand their structure and arrangement. 

Then when I got back, I used my collected reference to paint digital studies.

The first few thumbnails have turned out well in my opinion. The only problem was that they lacked a lot of depth and that was what I tried to pay more attention to on the remaining few. The last of the small, digital studies eventually shown my progress, the depth of field, of the area I depicted, was much more visible on this one.

I have also done a hand drawn study too, but I used markers for this one, mainly to try out something with a permanent mark.

Later I moved onto painting larger and more detailed studies. With the first one, I followed a similar idea to the last thumbnail study, done previously. I began by picking a colour palette for myself to use. I immediately noticed that my colours were not too similar to the ones on my reference photographs. This caused this study to partly lack depth, although that also happened due to me adding too much details in the distant objects, which should have been blurred/out of focus.

On the following study I decided to colour pick a few base colours, to help me paint. This way I'll at least understand where I went wrong with my colour choices. Then I eventually started picking my own colours for the brighter, as well as darker areas of the study. The key here was to replicate the colours and detail of the background, and the sky to create a stronger sense of depth. For the most part, I felt I did it right, but there were still a few slight problems. The grass area behind the three large rocks should have had a paler colour, to push it further back. Then the top of the small hill needed a slightly brighter peak/top, to make it stand out from its background.