"Mod Facade" Challenge - man_o_mule - Apartment Building

man_o_mule

I'm going to create a kind of generic apartment building. Going to try to keep it simple as i've never done anything like this before.

I want to go in a slightly different direction than most as well. I've already got a project i'm working on that's going to be all black and white. So i'm going to do the textures for this piece to fit into that project. going for a kind of inked comic book look. Hopefully this will make the texturing process for this easier making it much more likely that I will finish the challenge.

anyways on to my ref:





and here are some style ref:

Tumerboy

interesting premise, can't wait to see what you pull off.

Sage

Long time no see man. Good luck with your entry.

man_o_mule

it's a start i guess...

man_o_mule

motives

looks cool man. You might wanna add some trim between floors so u dont have to match up your brick perfect in all directions (me=lazy) + the fact that AO loves trim

man_o_mule

that brings up a good question.....how to do AO in max 2009. i'm kinda coming back to modeling after taking a long break. opened up max and all the lighting stuff is so different. not sure how to do anything anymore. anyone got a link to a quick AO/lightmap baking tut?

Edit: also changed the pic above. as you can see i'm at 11k polys but there's tons of optimizing to do. Still need to add the fire escape, drain pipes, lamp post, air conditioners, and maybe a tree or two.

Sage

Not sure how to do anything anymore., You sure fooled me. Looks real nice. For an ao bake this is what I read so I just followed along.

Change renderer to mental ray. Open material editor and look for ambient/ reflective occlusion base. But that map into the reflective map slot. make a light any light. turn it off. Do the typical thing to your object add uv coord etc, press 0 and RTT. Now you should find the ao bake option. Make a ground plane not sure if this is necessary but seems to help. Things to consider. If your low poly cover your high it will probably cast a shadow when you do the ao bake, if that happens go to element sub object mode and hide the faces. Nice work keep it up.

Alex

man_o_mule

Thanks, I'll give that a try once i get to uvmapping and texturing.

man_o_mule

little update.



I think this is going to be the angle for my finished shot. Did a bit of optimizing and added some more trim. I also had 3 sides to the building previously. Decided to delete one since it wasn't going to be seen. Put some boxes in as fake buildings to help frame the building.

Going to try and model the fire escape and some props to populate the sidewalk tomorrow.

man_o_mule

playing around with lights and render options. still need to add some more details. only at 11.5k right now.plenty of polys to work with.

Tumerboy

Looks great Mule! Your texturing is a bit uniform though, I'd fix that if I were you.

man_o_mule

LOL!!! i still have 23 days to do textures. Want to finalize geometry before i go and start UV mapping and texturing. almost ready to UV map though.

motives

yea sweet stuff! i dont agree with tumer. the AO-look is all the rage now a days

adam

You should have built this on a hill and had the second door on the left of the building like in your reference. Tsk tsk, easy way out!

:poly140:

Tumerboy

adamBrome wrote: »

You should have built this on a hill and had the second door on the left of the building like in your reference. Tsk tsk, easy way out!

:poly140:

And if it doesn't say "Taco Del Mar" on that corner, I'm going to be fucking Pissed!

man_o_mule

I should have incorperated the hill into the scene. would have made it look nicer. Main reason i didn't was for simplicities sake and to make it easier to reuse parts. Really want to get a bunch of pieces made so i can make a bunch of other buildings. Gonna need them for the overall project that i'm working on.

motives

you could possibly put your door at the same level as the other door (and still keep it simple) and then create a "wedge" piece to create the slope. maybe add a little stair up to the door and voila!

super_villain

I like it, though I will also complain that you should have stuck with the slope like in the pic. There is still time....