Week 4 - The architecture of building materials

I continued to texture and model various assets piece by piece so the room would come together. The next feature I wanted to focus on was the quoins around the door entrance. And during modelling these I realised that the entire dome of the building was not symmetrical, so I had to cut and mirror it in maya to reimport it, which fixed some symmetry issues I had been confused about before. I had originally decided to have a low poly and use the bevelled version as the high poly, however due to the darkness of the room, the indentations were not clear enough in unreal.

Instead, I decided to use the bevelled version as the low poly in engine to make the model look clean and readable.

Next, I wanted to texture the side bench around the walls. Following the reference, I made it the same texture as the floor, however the texture stayed pixelated due to the low quality cobblestone outline I was using, as well as this I wasn't happy with the roughness of the top of the bench. In the references there seems to be shine, as though the surface is polished. I left this texture for the moment as a placeholder with the intent to change it later.

At this point I thought it would be wise to start the feature of the room that I had been putting off. Putting up all the picture frames.

It took me a while to decide how I wanted to approach this, because of the dome shaped room, I knew I would have to manually rotate and place every one of them in. I decided I would have the paintings separate to the frames, as I was afraid of the image stretching in strange ways if I used a colour map. I didn't test it another way, so it may have worked, but having them separate allowed me a little more freedom when it came to adjusting the paintings. The way I approached this was inserting a plane within the frame in maya and exporting that into unreal.

At this point I was still intending to draw all of the paintings myself as long as time allowed it, however after a number of iterations of the Mary painting I realised it would be unlikely that would happen. I decided to draw the painting of Mary in Rebelle as I wanted to imitate the artistic, watercolour sketch look. At first I drew a less detailed picture of Mary imitating the original, but I decided I was unhappy with it. I then drew a far more detailed version that I was content with, but when I put it into unreal I had trouble getting the colour and style exactly as I wanted it. In the end the colour never looked right to me so in the final version I removed the blue and I still wasn't content but I left it anyway. I also tried drawing another copy of one of the paintings but I wasn't happy with it and realised it would be easier to simply photoshop and crop the paintings from the original.