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.

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.