Blog 3

 Week 4: There has been slow but stead progress with my modeling for this week. I have been Working on the smaller props. Now that the outer walls had been made I could focus on adding in the smaller items that make up the room. The biggest one that I worked on was the fireplace that features heavily in the "meeting room" scene. It is a main feature of the room and has many other smaller items cluttered ontop of it. I tried to build it in the most efficient way that I could. the biggest issue with making the fire place was the center piece. A circle platform that holds a Victorian floral pattern. This pattern is fairly intricate and would be very poly costly to model. After talking to my tutor about the issue, it was suggested that I use a program called "photosculpt". This is a program that can create geometry, parallax maps and normal maps for me. All I would have to do is take two clear pictures of the emblem on the fire place, or one similar. One photo from the front and another from a 45 degree angle. With the geometry that the program would generate from the two photos, I could place it ontop of a low poly version of the patter that I would make and use the generated high poly version as a high poly bake. This would save allot of polys and give a good effect on the model.



The next piece that I made were a small set of Victorian wall lights. These lights are placed twice on each of the four walls of the room. In the "meeting room" scene, they can be seen in nearly every shot. There are a few variations of the same light; as some are broken without lamp shades and other are working with the lamp shades on. I build a full one with the lamp shades on; as I can take the shades off or break one of the lights to make the variations afterwards. This was a fairly simple build. All that was needed was for me to draw a curve that mimicked the shape of the lights neck and extrude along it. Once this was done it was a case of extruding an edge-loop to make the protraction cup that appears under the light bulb incase the bulb breaks and a simple cylinder for the lamp shade. This was a simple build as it is a small asset that the player cannot get close to.



The next model that I made and am still working on is the two main chairs that the main characters sit on. These are two near identical red leather Victorian chairs. The issue with building this is that I need to make sure that the object looks soft enough so that it looks like a comfortable chair, unlike some ridged plastic thing. I've had some difficulty keeping it smooth and the geometry clean, however at the moment the whole chair body has been made with clean geometry except for the legs. It should be finished by Tuesday easily. After the chair is modelled I will use Z-brush to do the major details such as the rivets in the back cushion and all the scuff marks.

Photosculpt: http://www.photosculpt.net/