Architecture.

The project after the wheelie bin was to create a building, it's been completed for a while now but I've been sitting on it because I've wanted to add some finishing touches to the finals before I uploaded it. Now I have finally had the chance to spend an afternoon on it and I can post about it!

Our brief was to create a photo-realistic building using reference that we gathered ourselves. The building had to be old, something with an interesting look and a bit of character, 1970's council houses were out of the question! I went to a town near where I live that dates back to the Roman's to look for interesting buildings. I found a small church built around the 1900's, the building had a lot of interesting architecture and also had some modern extensions added to it. I've uploaded a few of my reference shots to help compare between the real-life version and my 3DS Max version.

The tri-limit for the building was 2,500, while using 2 1024's for texturing, we could divide this up if needed. Compared to the bin this was a much bigger project, but I was feeling confident. I ran into a few problems while constructing the building so my confidence didn't last long but I managed to figure most of them, or find a suitable work around, one example is I placed far too much detail around the windows, so I had to revert back to an earlier save to undo all the work I had done. This meant I did waste about 2 hours but I didn't fancy blowing my entire tri-limit on windows. 

Under construction

I created the building using 2,430 tris and I managed to squeeze in some details, most importantly a couple of door handles! On the 2 front doors to the church I added door handles, the back doors I left all handle less. I think this is a good way to show the players that a door is usable. It is this route or I could place novelty padlocks on the unusable doors but without any indication if a door is usable players like me will try to open every one. I spent the first 10 minutes of The Stanley Parable just trying to open doors, which the narrator then mocked me for.

Texturing an entire building was much harder than a wheelie bin I found out. I should have planned out my polygons in such a way that would make texturing easier, instead I put little thought into this and had already invested a large number of hours in modeling the building so I did not want to redo the entire thing. This left me with a building that was difficult to texture exactly how I wanted.

The final building: 2,430 tris & 6.25mb worth of textures

Finally the reason it has taken me so long to post this. I wanted to add a few smaller details to the building, like a ground to sit on, a few bushes, to really make the building stand out. I would have liked to have included a 3D viewer like in my previous Robot post but the program doesn't seem to like tiling textures, I will have a look into this however and update the post if I can find a fix!

EDIT: After a couple of hours messing around I've managed to import the building correctly, so it can now be viewed fully in 3D! The lighting isn't perfect and is causing some issues with the bushes but I'm okay with that. I have embedded it at the bottom of the post. 

Final building with some added extras

Coleshill Church from Braden May on Sketchfab.