FMP (Week 4) - Starting low poly modelling

This week I've spent mainly creating my low poly model for the main building in my scene. I'm still slightly behind schedule, my week has been filled with dentist appointments, running around and preparing for interviews (eek!). Along with that we had a visit at university from NaturalMotion where character artist George Brierley, a former DMU student, looked at some of our work and did a presentation on his role and art pipeline. Even though I'm not a character artist I found this really insightful and it's interesting to compare how different companies do each thing.

After experimenting with textures at the start of the week and finalising my texture process (I made a blog post earlier this week on this) I started modelling the main building in my scene. I decided to start with the main building as it is the most important asset and will undoubtedly have the most parts. It is a large chunk to do and will take up the largest amount of time, which is why I think that it was important to start with this asset.

So far I have modelled the majority of the main pieces. Including figuring out how the sliding doors will work. In the image above you can see on the left the final model separated clearly into objects by colour on the right the unique assets which will be replicated to save time and space when texturing and unwrapping. The full version with repeated assets contains over 12,000 triangles, whilst just the unique objects separately are just over 3,000.

A render of the image in sensible colours to show more detail.

Along with this I also imported the model back to my whitebox, to ensure that all of the scale and proportions were still correct.

I have now fully unwrapped my model and slapped on some placeholder textures to demonstrate and figure out what texture maps I am going to need and what is going to be where on texture sheets.

Along with this I also made a basic snow model to test out snow on my shrine and see how it looked. I am quite pleased with this result but still need to look further into vertex painting.