Game Production - Who's this weirdo taking pictures of bricks?

And so, my toughest project set to date truly showed me what this course is going to be like for the next few years. Originally, even taking my reference imaging was a challenge, because I failed to see a building I wanted to model within a relatively close proximity to my halls, and so had to venture out and get lost before I finally found a building I liked. Unfortunately, half the building was blocked by trees from one side, so it made taking reference images rather challenging. I just about managed it in the end, and although I had to do a whole lot of distorting to make them appropriate for use, but I was still able to model from them.

 I ended up spending a lot of my time in the labs in order to avoid distractions in my halls. 9-9 in the labs for 4 days straight really took it out of me, but I wanted to get things done to the best of my ability, so it was a small price to pay. The architectural brief specified it wanted tiling, a range of renders, bump mapping and basically just a few things I wasn't all that sure how to achieve effectively. I thought once I had the basic model done, it wouldn't require too much effort to then sort out the texturing due to what it was like for the bin. However, this project was completely different entirely, and I found even trying to render my model at the end took more time than I anticipated, hence the late nights. I'm pleased now I know how long a project of this scale will actually take, and so I can take this forwards to my future projects. I'm also pleased I now know never to ever produce a model with as many engons as I did this time round. After being relatively pleased with my model to begin with, I had to tear it apart on realising the hideous amount of engons I had produced. Well anyway, a nightmare later and I managed to produce something which does look like a building, and a little like the building I had referenced so I'm happy. Definitely wouldn't have managed it without my gurus though, top notch help there.

I feel like my renders are a lot better than they have been before, and probably do the building justice. Although not the neatest wireframe, and some of the tiling is at the wrong angle and wouldn't let me fix it, I'm happy with the overall look of it. Standing at around 2,089 tris, I didn't have issues keeping within the budget, but maybe looking back on it now there were more details I could have added. I'm also a bit annoyed at the weird green windows by the front door, but for some reason I couldn't get photoshop to like me that day. Anyway, all in all I enjoyed this project for the challenge it gave, and the way it helped me learn a ton of new techniques.