“Somewhat final” in that this post details the finishing of the building model, but not the exterior area – that’s a whole new area!
Anyhow, onto the matter at hand. The following screenshots and comments will detail the design/creation of the doorway section, as well as the final tweaks and basic administrative ‘sorting out’ of the building model.
[It’s worth pointing out that, chronologically speaking, the door section was actually modelled immediately after the exterior area – I feel however that it’s best to deal with the building modelling process entirely first before delving into the outside area design, for sake of keeping things from being too back and forth.
So in some of these screenshots you’ll see parts of the outside area. Don’t worry, I’ll be getting stuck into that all after this post!]
The first step – cleaning up the original door archway – I had some of the inset boxes, the same motif that crops up throughout the design, around the door-frame. If a door was going to be placed there they wouldn’t be visible, so I cut them out along with other unnecessary faces.
The door windows topology. I came up with the design by scaling down the original archway’s shape, then interpreting major curves that could sinuously flow off of it – then creating curves inbetween these and defining major areas for windows.
The various door iterations and copies. There were a LOT of tweaks required to get it working.
The shaded forms of the finished doorframe windows. Modelling wise, I used the same overall process as for the other windows in the building (as detailed in the last post). In this case, I also added a small amount of extra definition to the frames by insetting with extrude face, then extruding out the frames slightly – creating a raised area (can be seen slightly in the middle frames).
Topology of the above screenshot
Unlike with the previous windows, I made sure to make the thickness of the glass 10mm so that when I render it in VRay it doesn’t give me refraction issues (glass on the front left).
The actual door design – it was tricky trying to get it to stay consistent with the rest of the building style, but I think I managed a decent enough job. I used the inset boxes motif again around the sequential arches that lead to the door. I capped off the top of each arch with the ‘gem’ design.
I got the idea for the sequential arches by looking at various cathedral doors – such as this one in Bilbao, Spain.
The new door section fitted into the archway – worked out pretty well and definitely helps add more of a sense of completeness to the structure
Topology of the above
Model Organisation:
It would take forever to show the entire process for this, and is frankly unnecessary in this case – basically, I went throughout the building and renamed each section to a sensible name then grouped them. This was to aid in the organisation for when I brought the model into 3DS Max for UVing and rendering, so that I would be able to tell precisely what I needed to UV.
Part of the process involved going back to the ‘Arch Section’, as I named it, and removing unnecessary part of the models – leaving just what would need to be instanced around to create the building.
Anyway, that’s it for this long post – hopefully it was suitably illuminating!
The next post will deal with the naming conventions (dull I know, but it took a while and ended up being very helpful).
After that, there’ll be some sketchbook design work for the final, final, final stage of modelling – the building grounds.
Stuart McInnes 