Virtual Cities.

For this client project I will be using 3D software to construct a replica of the Cheyney Court building that can be located in Winchester City. Once the medieval building has been recreated in Maya, it will be transfered to the rest of the project that is being built within a scene in the Unrealengine.

The handover document and zip folder for this project is located at the end of the page.

Sections

1) Project Planning
2) Cheyney Court Build
3) Rendered Videos
4) Handover Document


1) Project planning

Before starting the clients project, I created a small plan to organise my time and tasks efficiently. The first part of the plan was to research the building styles of Winchester in the Jane Austen period. This led me to finding the Cheyney Court building that I would be recreating as a 3D model for the virtual cities project. The rest of my plan outlines what order task will need to be completed to make the final version of the 3D model and be ready to import into the Unreal scene for the client. Below are also some images I used as references in the making of the Cheyney court building.

images of Cheyney Court/ sourced from the internet



2) Cheyney Court Build





I began by importing a reference image of the Cheyney Court building into the software Maya, where I used it to create a simple outline shape of the build. I then placed outlines of doors and windows and coloured certain section for where I will later place textures.

Later into the build I added textures to the model using mega scans from Quixel. The type of textures used in the build were roof tiles, wooden beams, plastered walls and bricks. The mega scan textures used will be enhanced with other effects such as bump maps and ambient occlusion to make them appear more realistic when later rendered into the Unreal engine scene.

After adding some of the main textures I used the UV editor to change the placement of them for the different wooden beams and moved the geometry to give the appearance of more natural shapes from the wood warping over time. I also included different geometry and texture to the arches around the doors and windows to provide extra detail to the building. The medieval doors for the gatehouse were also made and textured with smaller details added to make it standout in contrast to the stone and plastered textures of the main structure.

Using Photoshop, I worked on improving the textures so that they were more seamless and visually comparable to the reference images. I did this by selecting different areas of the texture such as one of the bricks and changing its brightness or contrast levels. I also look at altering the colours slightly to match up to the images of the building.

I moved on to adding texture to the windows with a frost like overlay to make it feel more medieval. I also included curtain textures and wallpaper to make the view inside the building more visually interesting.



3) Rendered Videos

I have produced some rendered clips of the building during night and day with some light coming from the windows. I have included different angles to show the details in areas of the build.