The Blitz Building Project: Part 1

Towards the beginning of this project, I decided that I wanted a kind of castle-like architecture for my building. Originally, it was to be more akin to medieval Europe. I wanted to also play around with the scale of the building to stop it from look too similar to the other 2 buildings (within a certain extent of course!)

As I was analysing the building further, I noticed that the windows in had Chinese writing on them. This almost instantly made me change my idea because I found that a more suitable setting for the scene be something oriental. I finally decided to stop onto a restaurant with a slight old fashioned theme on the outside of the building. I researched into oriental doors and roofs and what could be in a scene of a restaurant.

I really wanted to add the lion statues commonly found in front of Chinese restaurants. Unfortunately I didn’t want to raise my tri limit that much further. I decided to make an interior after I played around with the idea of having a balcony on the second floor. “Since you can see inside, why not just make in inside!” I thought to myself and this is where most of my tris went into.

I made the mistake of making the chairs (unintentionally) high in the poly count. Because restaurants had many chairs, I figured they had to be an important feature to make look good.

The Balcony

However in the end I ended up reaching over 10k in tris! I really had to tone that down somehow.

I went and created and extremely low poly chair with a few of the high ones remaining however at the same time I also changed my mind to wanting to create access to the interior when I imported it into UDK. So I scratched the idea of the high and low poly chair and made them all medium low poly chairs (so much trouble for chairs!)

Second Floor Interior one side

I opened the front double doors and dragged the interior from the balcony to the bottom floor so that the player would be able to walk into. It was going okay until I ended up realising that there is many things missing that would be on the bottom floor of a restaurant (like a registration desk for waiters to show confirm the customers numbers and show them to their seats, etc.)

I ended up dragging it back upstairs to the balcony floor and went with the idea of trying to import my trash scene to use a platform to jump onto the second floor.

Second Floor Interior the other side ¦3

I was really disappointed with how my building turned out with the roof as I had trouble trying to get the shape and never went back to it after leaving it for a little while.

Because I had dragged my interior downstairs, I wanted to create a window in which you can see the stairs leading to the upper levels in the back of the room.

With the texture sheet I didn’t really know how many texture sheets we could use since I was unsure about how UDK works. To play it safe I ended up putting all assets onto one unique diffuse. This gave me barely any space to put much detail on many things. Rather than the 1024 texture sheet I usually go for, I upped it to double the size (2048) to see if I can compensate for having to fit everything on one sheet.

In the end I was a little disappointed with how the building turned out, the brick textures was an extreme pain to try and match with the other two buildings. One of my lecturers gave me some advice with perhaps creating some grime and dirt on alphas to perhaps match the other two buildings but unfortunately I had run out of IDs (up to 5) because of my tile-able textures.

So much to do, so little space... D:

I’m always learning from my projects though so I’m not completely bummed out by my performance. I've also realised that I do a lot of oriental related projects I tried to steer away from it for the this project but I ended up doing it anyways! I've decided that I'm done with the orient themes for a while as I'm sure everyone (as am I) is getting bored of it!

I’ll take it to part 2 of the project and fill you in on my struggles of importing everything into UDK!