The High Street, with a very disproportionate Peters Shoe Repair, I’ll fix that before the sun’s up. Next to that, Cex, Julia Knows and Cavells.
Buildings: Sheffield High Street
Category Archives: Video Games
Map boundaries [render]
I’ve been asked by a few people just how big this city model is, and which range it covers – so decided to render a full top-view of the map, so people can see the region I’m working on.
The dark buildings are buildings I’ve started working on to some degree.
To give a sense of perspective, St. Pauls Tower is the centre-most building, and you can clearly see just how much more work I have to do.
If you are in the Sheffield area, and are looking to help out with this mammoth project, you can register an account on here, and once I’ve validated that you are a real person and not a spammer – I can set your status to Contributor, which will allow access to a team-management system I’ve installed – and I’ll also set you up with commit/push access on Github.
Currently, I’ve no idea how I’m going to manage and organise a team – this is a labour of love project I’m doing in my free time: so some self-motivation on your part is a must.
While on the subject of layout – I’ve retextured the pedestrian areas to use some of the photographs I’d taken of the ground the other day.
I did take some more today, along with Mecca Bingo reference photos, but alas:
I have been experimenting with some of the grass textures from Blenderkit, but found them to inflate the filesize to be too large, so will be continuing with UV: though this is definitely not the end of my foray into this tool: particularly for uploading my urban environment textures into the community, as well as pooling resources of talented artists.
Building: Mecca Bingo
There’s still the numbered board on either side of the building to complete, the four panels below where the numbered board would be is a bus stop, and the buildings to the rear need windows adding in, and an actual brick texture.
I will also place another Mecca Bingo logo near the top of the front grey wall, and a hanging advertisment banner.
The elevation of this building will be interesting to work on, because it’s on a ramp with railings.
Now available on Github!
My project file (.blend) is now available on Github, feel free to download it and have a look around.
You’ll need to have git-lfs (Large File Support) installed because it’s bigger than the standard 50mb threshold, and will only get bigger!
Once you’ve installed it, you’ll be able to run from your command shell:
git clone https://github.com/davethefan/sheffield-fps.git to download the file, you’ll be able to open it in Blender as normal.
Alternatively, you can download the project as a zip file from the link above, or direct download from this website
You’ll need to have the Armory engine installed if you want to try and compile the game (which isn’t currently working) – but it’s not required if you just want to have a look around and render scenes and see how the file is organised.
Building: Winter Gardens
Firstly, thanks to Sticky Pearls for allowing me to use their track, Piano Song!
This is a quick modelling of the roof of The Winter Gardens in Sheffield.
I’ve yet to build the large wooden ribs, and have tried to capture the three-tiered shape of the glass.
In this video, there’ll also be some very rudimentary cropping of some textures for a collection pack I’m putting together for UK urban environments.
This will be a free, regularly updated release, and available here and github….at some point.
Building: Poundland
Here, I’ve created some 3D mesh from Text, and changed the font to Mixage Bold (the closest I could find to the actual font) – made it emit light, and placed it behind green glass so it gets that ambient glow.
I can only assume that the reason it is levitating off the ground is because of shoplifters!
I’m not 100% satisified on it, but hey – that’s todays building and none of them are going to be perfect on day one models.
The Roebuck [Images]
Just a quick update, because it has been a couple of days.
There’s still a bit of work to do on this, but this weekend I’ve had a bit of a rest from it and got trashed on Friday night and Saturday morning, not going to lie.
Saturday daytime, I just could not get into it because of how delicate I felt, and Sunday my internet was down until I managed to fix it late at night.
The picture used on the front of the building is from the Whatpub website
Replaced the window frames and sills with actual geometry and plain textures.
Windows are set to Armory Glass, so will show up as completely transparent in the viewport, renders and game engine.
For this building, I’ll need to:
- Complete the roof
- Bottom row of windows and doors
- Additional building adjoined to the pub
- The beer garden area
- The sign hanging from the side of the building
At a later date, I’ll be modelling building interiors, but this will be another stage of the development process.
Building: Charles Street / Genting Casino [screencast/UV Mapping Basics]
I’ve no rights to this music and have used it to teach the you the basics of UV mapping without permission.
We slow things down a little, and relax to some nice tech beats while texturing Charles Street car park, the ‘Cheese Grater’ as it’s oft known by locals.
These are base paintings and will be elaborated upon later , adding finer detail in both the image texture, and the mesh it envelops – but for now, we’re just wrapping the images around a box – and telling our UVMap which portion of the image our faces have wrapped onto it.
These models lack detail because I don’t want to get too fixated on one building when there’s a whole city center to bring to life – as well as ragequitting, this is why I’ve made the decision to put the Genting entrance on hold for the time being and work on another building.
I’ve raised the roof of the Cheese Grater to make it look more cube shaped.
Currently trying to model at least one basic building to the point of some resemblance every day.
Won’t take too long, eh?
Charles Street ‘The Cheesegrater’ / Genting Casino
No video tonight, I’m still not finished with this one – and since it’s technically two buildings, I’m allowing myself two days.
I’ll share some picture updates here:
Foyer area and signpost is still incomplete, it’ll be a reasonably complex scene.
I’m not sure where the glow is coming from – it looks inviting enough though, doesn’t it? Once the windowframes are blocked out, I’ll be able to turn the windows into coloured glass (which didn’t quite turn out the green I was expecting) it should spill out into the street: adding some ambience.
For this, I’ll use an Armory glass material, Cycles glass material will not work.
St. Pauls Tower [screencast/game asset]
To call this an Episode would be a tad unfair – there’s no dialogue per se, it’s a compilation of screencast segments where I’m making an attempt to texture one of the most icon buildings in the city center – with the tallest building there is.
I wanted to use the music from the end of my last video, in which we walked around the city a little – so in this video, I’ve used the whole song to show some screencast footage of building it, the clips aren’t really in any chronological order, more a stylised arrangement to the music.
Spoiler alert:
The video dramatically ends with an Armory error message fade to black.
Uniform receiveShadow not found.
Uniform lightProj not found.
Uniform envmapNumMipmaps not found.
Uniform receiveShadow not found.
Uniform lightProj not found.
Uniform lightProj not found.
As a chaos magickian who loosely holds a belief system which involves being your own God (or at least convincing myself I am during gnostic states): switching on the lights should be some day one shit.
In the last video (Episode 2), I was able to export the city to the Armory engine, but pardon the pun – it was very foggy.
Now, we have a Skylight, we need to tell the game engine which objects give out light, which receive light, and what objects cast and receive shadows – so it knows how to dynamically interact with it in our game environment.
Thanks for reading!
Music: David Guetta Ft Kelly Rowland – When Love Takes Over (Buzzby & Dane Robson Remix)
https://soundcloud.com/danerobson
Big thanks to Dane for letting me use this track.