Architecturally Speaking

Okay, so I'll admit it. It was pretty freaking awesome being able to relax for a week or so after the portfolio was finally up to snuff. But, as always, I got bored pretty easily. It reminds me that I'm one of those people that starts to lose my mind if I'm not being productive. It's very hard for me to be one of those people that just goes home every night after work and parks it in front of the T.V. Needless to say, it was nice to get back into what I like to call "creation mode".

So about that art deco-ish building I mentioned. Well, I've been plugging away at it. I'm done with planning, low poly modeling, UV layout, and world building. Observe:


There's some key things that I wanted to achieve with this project.

1) Make a modular environment.
2) Make something architectural.
3) Make something clean looking, and not putting a crap ton of grungy detail into it.

These are all things that I think about and wonder why I haven't done any of them. But no longer!

I'm working in unreal units and exporting from Maya with the model already at the proper size, which is something I haven't done until now. Making things modular is actually pretty easy, and snapping them together in UDK is pretty painless as long as you have Maya's measuring units set accordingly.

I originally didn't have the fountain, steps, guard rail, parking lot, or trees included as I thought that I could have a tighter angle that only shows off the building. This made for a pretty awful composition, so I scrapped it, and decided to put in the extra work to make more props for a wider view.

The water fountain will have water effects, with the water being handled by mostly transparency and specularity.

The overall lighting will be pretty similar to how it is now, with some tweaking most likely to follow. Especially after the texturing is done.

The trees were made fairly quickly in Speedtree and the terrain was sculpted in Maya. I tried using UDK's terrain editor, but it was giving me all sorts of problems. Basically, the terrain I generated would only appear if the camera was 200 miles away from it. Lame? Doesn't matter though. The trees and terrain are far off in the background, so they don't need to look stellar anyway.

I won't be doing a whole lot of Zbrushing this time around as I'll be testing out Crazy Bump. I must say, it's pretty awesome so far. One of the main reasons the bike took so long is that every single object was Zbrushed. It was a project I used to show that I have high poly sculpting chops. Typically, a lot of environment props will just get crazy bumped and generally take less time. As is the case with this project.

I almost wanted to do a night scene, but everything else in my portfolio is really dark/ sunset-ish. So, I opted for some daytime lighting to mix things up a bit.


So at this point, everything is set up in the editor. All I have to do is make all my diffuse, spec, normal, and opacity maps and import them in. And make adjustments to the lighting. Shouldn't take more than a month as long as my life doesn't get too hectic. Then again, I'm making trips to both Wooster, OH and Rochester, NY in October. Which will eat up some of my time as well as being generally awesome.