top of page

Yr3 Week 7: Style Matrix - Realistic Shop Building

  • katiemorganbyrne
  • Nov 18, 2016
  • 3 min read

For my third style matrix project, I had originally planned to create an environment to go along with my aviator character but decided against this. This is mainly because although it would've made a nice piece to accompany my character, this is one of my final chances before FMP to experiment with something I haven't done before, and I wanted to make the most of this opportunity. I chose the realistic shop brief, as I wanted to practice making realistic textures and having a go at modular asset creation, two things I haven't tried before.

I started off by researching realistic buildings in environments and modular designs. I quite liked the stand alone buildings on street corners (circled in pink on the moodboard), and decided that this would be a good approach for my building as mine is also going to be standing alone.

I then decided to go with local buildings for texturing purposes, and quickly realised that there aren't a huge number of interesting buildings in Leicester. I wanted to create something which had quite interesting architecture that would be unique and quite fun to re-create. I collected some images of all of the buildings in Leicester which interested me and I thought might be good options for this brief.

I chose to go with a restaurant which is found in the side streets behind the main town square. The restaurant is called Le Bistrot Pierre, and I decided to go with it as the top half of the building is still relatively old and preserved, however the bottom floor where the restaurant is located is modern and bright which I thought was quite an interesting contrast between the two.

I put together a quick sheet to help me break down the building where I colour co-ordinated which sections of the building I am to have as repeatable and also a quick texture breakdown.

In 3ds Max I quickly made a block-out of the shape of the building and then using a grid system measured out each modular piece to be the correct size to snap together correctly in the scene.

This image shows all of my final pieces fully modelled and then the pieces placed together in the layout of the building also. Making all of the modular sections align was quite a lengthy process, but I think I am starting to get the hang of it and can definitely see it's uses.

I imported all of the modular sections into UE4 and began placing them together. And of course nothing ever goes as you'd want it to and have encountered a few problems.

From certain angles seams are visible in the mesh between the modular pieces, at first I thought maybe they were not lined up with the grid correctly in 3ds Max, but this doesn't seem to be the case and I have checked many times. Along with this, as my building is at quite a slanted angle, this seems to have affected the pivots on the pieces quite badly, and I am unable to easily move the pieces around as the pivots are no longer straight. I am hoping there is an easy solution to these problems as they seem quite simple and I'm not too sure what I'm doing wrong.

For the next week I plan to model remaining details for my scene; the back pieces, roof, lamps, drains, signs, marquees, etc and fully unwrap my model. Giving me the final week to focus on texturing and lighting.

Comments


bottom of page