Just a quick catchup, I know it has been a while since I posted a talking video! Here, I’ll briefly cover adding some vegetation to grassy areas, which I’ve done using the Blenderkit addon.
I’ll show you how I was applying textures to the roads in the city, and talk you through some of the buildings I’ve done this week. If you’re keeping a regular eye on what’s going on here, you’d have seen a lot of this before, it is just an update video for the past week or so.
I’ve got a bit of a cold, so please excuse coughs and other such noises.
Allergy warning: Though every effort has been taken to remove sharp inbreaths, some may remain.
Lord Nelson, a public house on Arundel Street, known for its vibrancy. The only UV mapped parts of this building are the doors and banner: the rest are plain colours picked from the reference image at the bottom right.
The windows are a generic glass texture I’ve been using for almost every building, this is so that any changes I make to the standard glass in the environment will affect every building at once.
I have done this deliberately, because I know that the game engine is very funny about transparent textures, and will refuse to compile if I don’t get it just right.
The buildings current UV map.
The UV map will later be expanded upon with brick textures, and promotional signage for the side of the building like chalkboards and banners.
This is an earlier render from before I’d mapped in the logo text and doors from the UV map above. The black ‘skirting board’ texture also needed a bit of work.
Blender’s Freestyle lines help to add perspective, a bit of a comicbook feel and help identify issues with the texturing of the mesh – it really helps with scenes like this, because if you know the area, it automatically looks familiar to you.
If tonights buildings were branded, they would be Pizza Hut and Fone+
I’ve wanted to build these from just a single,good reference image side by side with the model: trying to find the most efficient method. I’ve not done any work with the logo – in an aid to speed up the modelling process.
I’ve applied basic textures to the walls, they are nothing more than diffuse colour textures – the black portions are glass textures. To the left,we have lastnights buildings.
I like the oversized windows – they’re almost caricatures and will allow a lot of light into the interior scenes, and provide a great view from inside the building.
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:
My memory card died.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The Roebuck
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.
