A Few Building Shots

Here are a couple quick AO renders of two of the buildings I've been working on. I'm happy with the way they're coming along but there's still a ton of work to be done on them.

Kinda neat, huh?

Ugly faceting on the doorway curves, way too sharp corners on the columns and a ridiculously under-modeled lantern.

Nope, neither building has a backdoor, or a back wall, or even a floor. I suppose I'll never make it in architectural previz.

Shutters and doors that look like ugly slabs of drywall.

I honestly don't think I needed to model the fluting on the columns on the right. I may rebuild them without it and add the details in Z-Brush later.


And a quick screengrab of the wireframe on shaded.

One thing I'm going to need to address is the uneven level of detail on different parts of these buildings. If you look closely you'll see some beveled edges here, some sharp edges there, modeled details on some parts, plain, flat polys on others. There is some method to my madness though. After I finish one more building, the plan is to unwrap them and take them into Z-Brush where I'll add some distressing and some modeled textures. The door and window edges that show faceting because there are too few polys will be smoothed and dinged up a bit. I'll add some weathering to the columns on the right-hand building and texture the shutters and windows. After all that I'll export a Normal Map and see what that does for me. I'm crossing my fingers that that solution works out. One thing I'm not sure how to handle is how to combine a Normal map meant to simulate textures and the normal information you get when you throw an Average Normals on a few polys or when you manually set normal angles or perform a Smooth Edge command. I'm confident someone, somewhere has explained this. In time I'll track it down.

Cheers.