The Fifth House Done

Here it is...

Yesterday I finished the 5th house, only 15 more to go. This is probably one of the biggest houses I've done but it didn't take long considering. 

The ground floor includes a dining room, living room, kitchen, pantry, mech room, library, garage and a pool.

I decided early on to include a big porch area at the front of the property for the residents to sit and watch the world go by.

The first floor includes 3 en-suite bedrooms with walk in closets and a games room.











Thanks for reading.

The USP .45

It's finally finished.

I am so happy to say that the gun is finally finished!! It has been rather stressful but I've learnt so much.Of course there are little changes I could make in the future so it's 100% ready for animation and texturing but for the moment I am happy with the result.

That rounds off February's tasks and I look forward to more challenges in March.

Thanks for reading. I'll be back soon.

February Projects Continued

Today I have finished the fourth house and have made progress with the gun. At the end of this post are lists of cars and weapon ideas for the game.

The Fourth House
In comparison to the other houses I've modelled this one was a lot quicker to create.

The Front View



I will definitely be sketching my own designs for the rest of the project as they end up being a lot quicker to model and I enjoy coming up with the ideas now that I'm comfortable with Blender and modelling houses in general.







The Back View



There isn't much more to say about the house, I'm happy with how long it took and how it turned out.







The Gun
I've spent another 4 hours on the gun and have added more detail.

I've added the barrel, space for the front site, rear site and the safety lever among other details.

I think with another 2-4 hours of work I will have the USP 45 modelled ready for rigging in March. 












Here is a link to a list of cars I am thinking of including, there is a mix of old and new cars. I may add others as the project progresses - The Cars

Here is a link of weapons I may include, most of the weapons in the list are from answers to my survey of what gamers enjoy fighting with - The Weapons

Thanks for reading. There will be one more post rounding off the month then I'll be moving to the tasks for March.

Houses and Gun Progress

The past few days I have been focusing on creating my own house plans and modelling the USP 45.

The House Plans

The 3 houses I've modelled so far were loosely based on floor plans I found online because I needed to get accustomed to proportions and measurements. I would love to model houses based on my own designs. So far I have created floor plans for 2 houses shown below.

The image on the left shows the ground floor of the house, complete with outside area.




I was debating redoing the plans digitally as well in Photoshop or Illustrator but decided that I didn't need to as the measurements were all there, especially because I could spend them time modelling instead.

Here is the first floor of the house, as you can see I have included 3 en suite bedrooms and a games room.









This image shows the floor plans for a bungalow. 

It's smaller than the other houses and only has 2 bedrooms but does have a huge open plan kitchen and dining room area.

This is the house I am currently modelling.





The Gun





I've spent a few more hours on the gun today; focusing on the slide, space for the hammer and general detailing.

I'm really happy with how it's looking so far but as you can see there is still more work to do before it looks ready for texturing and rigging.







The Fourth House

The next house is taking shape, this one is based on the bungalow floor plan sketch.

I have found that modelling from my own measurements and design is a lot quicker than using floor plans found online. I have a good idea in my head of how I want everything to look.

I will continue to work on this and hopefully finish it this week.




Thanks for reading. I shall be posting again soon.

The Third House and Gun Continued

So for the rest of the week I continued using Blender and I'm definitely getting more proficient with the program.
There were 2 main focuses; working on the gun and starting my third house.

The Gun
I've put a few more hours into the gun, progress isn't as obvious in comparison to the house modelling but with perseverance I'll get there.

I am trying to keep the poly count low and the topology clean for animation later on. 










I will be using the subsurface modifier to smooth out the edges at the end.

The Third House
It's another bungalow but a lot more extravagant. It's clearly not finished but here are some images of my progress.

The Front View 

I've added colour to each section so you can make out each room. So far I've created the garages, 2 en suite bedrooms, library, pantry, kitchen, family room, living room and the start of the master suite, which is the light purple pieces on the right hand side.








The Back View

Here you can see the green floor pieces that will make up the outside area. It will continue around the house where I will be creating a pool.





This week I will be continuing to work on the gun and the third house. I am hoping to model another house among other bits and pieces. I have more time off this week so definitely will be making the most of it.

Thanks for reading.

Solvtng a Major Problem

I'm so glad that I've had the entire day to do work, all things considering it's been awesome. The 3 main focus areas of the day were sorting out the kit pieces, remodelling the bungalow in Blender and modelling the first gun.

Big Problem, Simple Solution

Now, I realised when I was modelling the bungalow that the scale in object mode was messed up for every kit piece because when I originally created them I had changed the dimensions in object mode rather than in edit mode. 
The image to the left shows how it should look after you've modelled something. 
The importance of this sank in when I realised that when I import the pieces into Unreal nothing will match up properly to the Unreal unit scale and would be time-consuming to adjust later on down the line. 


I spent 40 minutes remodelling a few kit pieces but after doing some research I found this (http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/28558/scaling-in-object-and-edit-mode) it was literally a life saver. 
If you scroll just over halfway down the page you will find the answer that made me very happy. I just needed to press ctrl and a then select scale in the popup menu. After selecting all my pieces I followed those instructions and it was all fixed in a second!!

The Bungalow

I spent a few hours today remodelling the bungalow, it was definitely good practise using Blender with something I had already done before. 




You'll probably notice that I've added a little roof over the outside porch with a pillar.





One of the main reasons I decided to create it in Blender is so that I have a solid reference for when I have to recreate it in Unreal since I can't use my previous version anymore.







The Gun
After a lot of scrolling through You Tube I made a decision to follow the USP 45 tutorial by Zach Hixson. It was perfect because it is a simple design and the videos are easy to follow for beginners. Here is my progress for today: -

It's definitely getting there but I've still got a lot more to do. I am learning so much whilst modelling this gun and becoming more efficient with Blender.









Thanks for reading, will be a few days until my next post.

A Big Decision

Earlier this week I made the decision to switch to Blender as the primary 3d modelling tool for my project. The main reason being I couldn't afford to use 3ds Max for the duration of my project especially just after buying an expensive computer. So I felt the decision needed to be made sooner rather than later considering I had only created a few pieces so far.

After using it for a week I'm definitely getting better but will admit that it has been very stressful at times due to the amount of differences between the 2 programs.

I have remodelled 40 of the 41 kit pieces, shown below: -

The only kit piece I haven't been able to model in Blender is the spiral staircase. I spent around 4 hours today attempting it but couldn't get the result I wanted. Eventually decided I should leave it and potentially come back to it when I am more experienced with Blender.

Due to the switch I have revamped my task list for February to make it a bit more realistic. Tomorrow I will be remodelling the bungalow and if I have time starting a 3rd house.

Thank you for reading.

The Second House and PC Update

This week I've been focusing on finding floor plans for my houses and working on my second house. This one only took me 3 evenings to create, finalise and organise so approximately 5 hours, which I'm pretty happy with considering how long it took me to do the first house. Although this one is only one floor and not as many kit pieces overall. I did need to add a couple of new kit pieces including a thin floor piece that is 1m by 2m to help fill the garage roof neatly. Overall there are now 41 kit pieces.

Below is a few images of the house from different angles.

The house contains 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a laundry room, a garage and an open plan kitchen and living space. 

There were 212 kit pieces used in total for this house so definitely a lot less than the first one.

I think this house will be perfect to test out my kit pieces in Unreal, which I may do at some point this month. I'm looking forward to virtually walking around the house and making sure all the proportions are accurate for gaming.






This week my new computer tower arrived; The Vanquish Spec-GT Mk V by PC Specialist, which is perfect for what I need. I absolutely love it!

The next house I plan to build will be somewhere between the grandeur of the first and the simplicity of the second.

Thanks for reading. I'll be back soon.

First House Finished...

...well the basic structure is now done. In this post I will show you each floor of the house so you can see how everything came together. I've used different colours for each room so I can easily identify them.

So here is the finished house complete with roof. It took me countless hours considering I hadn't created something like this before. There is a total of 358 kit pieces used.

You can see the balconies better in this image than the other one.










The Ground Floor

The ground floor includes a game room, bathroom, closet, theatre, kitchen, pantry, mech room, living room, elevator space, pool and garage.

The ground floor uses 162 kit pieces in total.








The First Floor

The first floor includes the master suite complete with en suite walk in closet and a balcony, an inside balcony over viewing the theatre, a second bedroom with en suite and balcony, laundry room, third bedroom with en suite, linen closet, library, elevator space and a fourth bedroom above the garage with en suite and walk in closet.

The first floor uses 196 kit pieces in total.




I found the plans for a similar house that I used as a guideline to ensure things were the correct proportion. Then I mixed it up with my own ideas. I'm pretty happy with the finished product and I'm sure the next house will take less than half the time this one took.

Thanks for reading. I'll be posting again soon.

The Finished Kit

There ended up being 39 kit pieces. It definitely sounds like a lot but they all serve a purpose and helped me to create my first house and will help to create every other building in the game. I will show you all of them giving a brief explanation of what they are.

The Wall Pieces

In this image we have from the left: - 

• Average corner wall with floor 
• Average wall with floor 
• Average floor 
• Average wall with 30 cm floor extrusion 
• Average wall with 30 cm floor extrusion and 10 cm wall extrusion (to compensate for wall thickness)
• Wall 190 cm (for short doorways)
• Average wall with 10 cm extrusion
• Lastly just an average wall

An average wall dimension is 10 cm thickness, 300 cm height and 200 cm width, all other average walls are based on this with extra extrusions.

The Doorway Pieces

• Garage Doorway
• Corner Right Doorway
• Corner 2 Doorways
• Corner Left Doorway
• External Double Doorway with Floor
• External Single Doorway with Floor
• Internal Single Doorway with Floor
• Internal Double Doorway with Floor
• Short Internal Single Doorway with Floor

The Fillers and Pillars

• Average Small Floor Filler
• Pillar 10 cm with Floor
• Pillar 10 cm
• Pillar 10 cm with 30 cm Extrusion
• Pillar 20 cm
• Pillar 20 cm with 30 cm Extrusion

The Roof and Pool Pieces

• Roof with 10 cm Extrusion (Same as average floor size just with the extra 10 cm) 
• Roof with 10 cm Extrusion on 2 sides
• Pool Wall Floor (200 cm high)
• Pool Wall (200 cm high)

The Staircases

• Average Staircase
• Spiral Staircase

These may be too specific to use in other houses but I hope I'll be able to use them throughout the game and maybe add some more variations to the kit. The staircases were definitely the most challenging kit piece to work on as there were so many measurements to take into consideration.

The Thin Wall Pieces

• Thin Corner Wall Floor
• Thin Floor
• Thin Wall Floor
• Thin Wall with 30 cm Extrusion
• Thin Wall Average Floor
• Thin Wall

These thin walls are 100 cm in width but have the same height as an average wall.

The Window Pieces

• Large Wide Window
• Large Single Window
• Small Single Window
• Small Double Window

Thank you for reading. The next post will show the finished house using this kit.

House Modelling: Problems Solved

After having a go at creating the first house with the 16 kit pieces I realised very quickly that I need a few more pieces, for example a thin wall piece that has a connected floor of 200 cm, a few door corners and a second wall piece with an extra 10 cm extrusion (wall thickness) so it will fit flush in the corners. An example is shown below: -

Before                                                                                             

After

This worked really well but once I started to work on the interior I realised the 10 cm wall thickness messed around with how everything came together particularly with doorways. Here is an example of the issue: -

The circles show you breaks in the wall and the squares show that the walls are lined up at the edges where there should be a break, for an intersecting wall. 

This is because the doorways facing left are using up extra space with their wall thickness. 

It’s even more problematic considering I need to add another wall between the light pink doorway and the edge of the yellow floor to create a closet space, which would make everything another 10 cm out.

One way of fixing this is to have an internal doorway piece that incorporates the 10 cm wall thickness within the 2m floor. Another way would be to rearrange the current pieces so the doorways face forward but I don’t want to mess with my plan or restrict the directions in which I can place pieces in the kit.

I decided to create an internal doorway piece that has an overall length of 200 cm as oppose to 210 cm as well as keeping the longer one for other areas. 

Here is how it all worked out : - 

You can see I also added an extra floor piece to make the bathroom bigger. Overall I achieved what I wanted to with the shorter doorways.

There were many problems I had to work around but the last problem I wanted to talk about is floor gaps. Here are some images so you can see what I mean: -

Before

After

Everything else is in line but there was an annoying gap. In the end I had to create a small floor filler of 10 cm to fill in any floor gaps.

That's all for now. I'll be posting again soon with another house modelling update.