Reflection of the Village building project

The Ninth week I finished with the Village building project, which was to handed in and looked at on Monday.

Overall I am quite happy with the Village building project, I managed to work within the deadline and I learnt a lot of new skills throughout the project, such as hand painting textures. I feel I have achieved painting textures as a new strength, as I captured the stylized, chunky, hand made look of the style guide. However I could of improved on the textures with adding Normal maps and specular maps, I also needed to add a light map to my model to correct the lighting when It was imported in the engine, as when I imported the model, it looked too light and shiny. 

These are the Orthographic and perspective view renders of my finished model without textures.

These are print screens of my model imported into the UDK engine, as you can see compared to the other models in the scene, my model Is a lot lighter and shinier. Which is why I needed to make a light map, but at this point, I did not know how to. However, despite this problem I still think my final model fits well within the environment and the style.

I Also learnt new skills with uvw unwrapping and how to use multi-sub textures. I had not used multi-sub object textures before and did not know how to apply tiling textures correctly, therefore I had to look for tutorials and use my own trial and error attempts of creating a multi-sub object. I found this very difficult and took me a long time to understand how to make it work, eventually I managed to work it out by myself and have gained a new skill, that I will be able to apply again to new projects.

This Is the final texture map for the additional wood textures. This was the only texture map I made as the other textures were tiling textures. 

These are the hand painted tiling textures I made using Photoshop.

These are the final renders of my model with textures.

 Overall I think the final model is a good product of what the brief wanted and fits to the style guide well, as it has chunky wedging shapes, has chunky stylized textures, fits the bright positive colour palette and fits the handmade medieval look to the surrounding village. However if I were to improve the final model, I would add some more detail such as bump maps, to make the model look more realistic. Especially to areas, such as the roof tiles and the brick wall to make the textures pop out. I would also add tile shapes around the edges of the roof, to make the roof look chunky. Add support beams to the under side of the building, as the building looked too top heavy. 

In reflection with the Village building concepts, I feel I achieved a lot and improved since the previous stylized rock project, However I could of spent more time polishing of the final concepts.

First to begin the concept process I started by researching. I mainly sourced my research from the internet, using website such as pinterest. After researching material such as medieval taverns, I created mood boards from my research so that I can start generating ideas into silhouettes.

Once most of the design process was complete I created a basic model of my design, I then took a render of what I had created and opened it into Photoshop, so that I could quickly paint over the top of it to add details and further improve my design. After I could go back to my 3d model and add the details of what I have drawn. I did this so that I could add details at an earlier stage in the design process, developing my design from 2D to 3D and back.

I then moved onto concepts ideas, starting with silhouettes for the tavern sign and then sketching my ideas.

Once I had my final designs, I moved onto colour studies to achieve a colour that matching the style guide. I decided to choose the colour variation at the bottom left for my final design, as the colours and lighting matched the positive fantasy colour style. 

After I had my final design, I moved onto the orthographics.

This is the final design for my village building tavern.

This is the final concept design for my village tavern building. I used the screen shot from importing my model into engine, then opened it in Photoshop so that I could paint over the top.

I also pushed my final concepts further, by thinking about environment and atmosphere change.