Project: Shop Front

Starting the project, I felt a bit overwhelmed. I didn’t feel like I had enough experience to build something as big and as complex as a building in 3Ds Max. It seemed complicated and I was worrying that I wouldn’t manage it. Still, I found that it was a matter of stacking boxes on top of each other and making them look like a house through carefully chosen placement and textures. Checking for unnecessary or weird geometry was also important. 

I wanted my shop to be unique, so I chose to model a fortuneteller’s shop. As always, I started by gathering ideas in a mood board: 

Since fortuneteller’s in most media are portrayed as excentric and unique people, I wanted my house to reflect that: it had to be something very colourful, with an interesting shape. Maybe a bit hippie and overall look intriguing. With the mood boards, my biggest problem is that I get ideas, I know what I want to do with them, but I can’t find the words to write clearly on the page and I mostly need to work on the way I organize my projects. 

Having gathered the ideas, I wanted to get a clearer image of what I was going for, so I quickly sketched something in a random notebook:

From the first page, I liked the idea of a wagon, a house on wheels, because it implies the owner moves a lot, and fortune tellers are usually travelers, moving from place to place. Still, the form of the house was a bit too simple, too perfectly geometrical and I didn’t quite like that. So, in the second and third pages I tried varying the form.

After getting a clearer image of what I intended to do for my shop, I painted my textures, using the references I had gathered in my mood board. 

I started with the brick wall texture:

It turned out fine, without any problems on the way, and I managed to paint it quicker than I had expected. Looking at it now though, I would have straightened out those slightly diagonal lines. I think it would have looked way better, especially when it tiles. 

The second one was the roof tile, which I like how it turned out the most:

It looks colourful, and the flowers give off that magical, easy-going, excentric impression, like the owner of the house is used to living in nature and doesn’t mind a bit of colour and spontaneity in their lives. I don’t think there’s anything I would have done differently for this one, Though maybe I should have checked how it tiles in the earlier phases, since it took longer to correct later. It is something I’ll keep in mind from now on. 

The next one was the plaster:

The colour seems a bit dirty, greish, so that’s something I would change now. Otherwise, it was a simple texture to make and I finished it quickly, though I had a tendency of making the cracks too dark and it looked visually tiring on the model. I had to change the opacity of the shadow layer.

I proceeded with the details such as the wood beams and windows:

I wasted a lot of time on this, worrying about how it looked, trying to make it perfect. I ended up not using some of the space I had on the texture sheet, so that is something I will need to work on in the future. I worried about how the windows looked in Photoshop, they seemed too simple and I wanted everything to look perfect from the beginning, which slowed me down. Turned out, the windows looked quite okay on the model and I was worrying for nothing. I like how the wood beams, especially the ornate ones look, though. I made the grass for the plane underneath the house last, so it looks a bit stretched on the model. I’ll have to organize the space on the texture sheet better and think in advance what I’m going to do with it. 

The last texture sheet was the one for the props, which I made after I finished modeling the house, unwrapping the objects first and using the method we used for the treasure chest:

In my opinion, the texture sheet looks messy, but the textures looked alright on the model and since I didn’t have that much time left on my hands anymore I left it like this. Doing the texture for the crystal globe was the hardest part (that and organising my layers, if I’m being honest), since I didn’t really know how to properly unwrap a sphere. In the end, through trial and error, I managed to make it look right.

As for modeling, I first brought my textures into 3Ds Max and made the main body for the house: the walls and roof. Then I made all the other pieces: wood beams, door, windows and wheels and put them all together. I still didn’t have an exact image of what the shape of my house would be, just a vague idea, but I moved the pieces around until I was pleased. Before the first feedback, my house wasn’t well balanced: if it were a real house, it would have collapsed. So I followed the advice and added more pieces to balance it:

I then proceeded to build up the rest of the house, add more beams and do my best to match the tris limit. I then modeled the props and the plane on which the house would stand and, after finishing the props’ texture I added that too. The most difficult part was reaching the limit and respecting the budget. I also had some unnecessary geometry I had to erase, and it caused problems when it came to the tris and polygon count. I will have to remember to always check for that during the process and not only at the end. I also had some shading problems with the roof after I cut out the 3D tiles, but I solved it by detaching the tiles and erasing the cut out forms, flattening the roof. 

This was the final model:

Overall, it turned out better than I expected, though I really need to organize myself, make a plan for projects and stick with it. I had made one, but it wasn’t a clear, structured one and, though it helped me figure out what I still had to get done and how far I was behind with my work, since it wasn’t a fixed schedule, I always ended up not following through with what I had decided. So organization and a cleaner workflow are the things that I need to work on the most. 

And this is the model after I imported it into the Unreal Engine: