The Gate!
After texturing all the smaller buildings and assets, it was time to tackle the big assets, starting with the gate, one of the main features of my planned renders and overall environment, and I had a lot of fun texturing it, whilst it looks similar to the housing buildings due to the palette, I tried to format it like I did in the thumbnailing for it, largest parts are the brightest, smallest parts are the darkest.
Geometry wise, the Gate is split into two parts; GateFoundation, and GateOverlay, with there being side panels that are completely different geometry and a GlassLamp. Before I was actually able to texture these, I needed to re-UV unwrap it, as all the parts of the final model were different unlinked geometry, so I joined them and re-UV’ed, even if the geometry was unjoined, here is how they look!
When all combined, it looks like this!
Render Tests!
At this stage, I needed to start playing around with my render options so that I could get the best outcome for my immersive environment, I already had a few angles previously that I had referenced here, but considering mostly everything at this point is textured, I needed to see how everything looked.
This was the flat render I got when I rendered without any lighting, except the world light, and it looks, meh. So I experimented with a bit of lighting and created a little lamp thingy, to project my lighting better. I also decided to try and lower the strength of the world light, so that the new lights I put in place could be more apparent and even suffice as a focal point for the viewer.
I am a lot happier with this version, there still could be a few tweaks for it, and I probably will paintover with some extra effects/lighting to improve this render, I may experiment with framing in the limited time I have at the moment, shall have to see. At the same time, I don’t think im going to be able to get this into unreal engine by the time the deadline arrives. I will most likely do that after submission, just to see how it could’ve looked, but there is no way I can get it sorted by the deadline unfortunately. So I will solely have to rely on blender Cycles and post processing to get the most amount of detail possible in this piece.
Until then, in Week 15, its building time.