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.
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.
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:
Charles Street car park, with the windows to Genting to the right: to the left, the UV material is broken, so I’ve reset it and turned the material to a neutral grey while I model it.
Adjusted the colours in GIMP for a bit of a different feel
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.
Filmic colour management really handles the light more realistically than sRGB
Have your volume control ready, because the start of the audio in this is broken!
In this video, if you can hear it – we have a look at the Peace Enforcer model I teased about in the last videos title, and optimising your renders for sales on Redbubble.
My microphone volume is incredibly low (and I can’t be bothered to rerecord it), so I’d turn your volume up _after_ the first musical segment to actually hear what I’m saying. To save you damaging your eardrums, the first sentence is: ‘Hello, I’m David – and this is the second instalment: aaand I’ve rendered this way too fast, so straight on with the mu–‘
I will be looking at using the blender-osm plugin by Prokitetkura which can import OpenStreetMap data from within Blender, and I’ll be attempting to compile it with the Armory game engine so I have the basis of a first-person-shooter level layout.
We explore Laycock House and Premier House on the map, and compare the building shapes to how they are in the real world, and I don’t want to spoil it for you – but we have some success with exporting to the Armory engine!
Music (Peace Enforcer): Henry Homesweet – Joshy
Music (Armory export): David Guetta Ft Kelly Rowland – When Love Takes Over (Buzzby & Dane Robson Remix) https://soundcloud.com/danerobson
