Making Bioshock Infinite's Montgomery Residence Part 2

CAGD230: Game Scene

Week 2

Progress Report: Week 2 is here! And the progress I've made for this week is completing most of the pieces for the first floor! I had to remodel most of the pieces after learning new concepts in class. Mostly using the "snap to grid" feature and learning how to properly extrude and bevel which is really helpful for making more complicated pieces. I'm satisfied that my pieces look nicer now. 

last week

this week

I laid out an example of the first floor and it looks pretty good if I say so myself. Of course, it doesn't come without problems. As you might notice, the poly count is pretty high, over 9000 tris to be exact (haha). 

But this is the total running, including the bipedal human model that takes up about 4000 tris. Of course, I'm still over 5000 tris... It seems that the first floor itself is more than 4000 tris. 

You might ask "what the heck is taking up all the poly count?" Well, it's the door and the corner pieces. The door has a tri-count of 900 alone. The corner pieces have 600 and there's two of them so both would already be 1200+. Other pieces such as the window, pillar, and panel walls only range from 100-300 tris. And yes, I have been deleting the faces that are not seen. Well not all of them, the corner pieces probably have some but it's mainly the beveled part of it. The door is mostly cleaned up, I'm afraid that the count might be coming from me trying to get rid of ngons. Thus resulting in maybe unnecessary cuts such as the sides and in the middle. Honestly, I'm surprised the door has that much tris as it seems a bit simpler than the window. My guess is all the extruding I did along with bevel. I'll have to remodel it to see what went wrong. I guess this weekend will be a long one. 

A 900 tris door next to a 380 tris window

Poly Count for Week 2: 

Making Bioshock Infinite's Montgomery Residence Part 1

CAGD230: Game Scene

Week 1

Progress Report: Another project has been assigned and this time we are grouped up and to construct a building from a video game. Our group chose Bioshock Infinite as our inspiring game. And I have taken the challenge of modeling the Montgomery Residence. 

It's truly a beast, especially with our limit in polycount, a limit of 5000 tris. Well for this project we need to work with modular modeling so, at the very least, it will be like making Lego pieces and click the pieces together into the final product. 

For this week, we need to start off by blocking our scene. Easy polys to map out what we will need to model. Though for me I somewhat have to start modeling so I can tell the pieces apart by sight and not the outliner. Because, for a building like this, your outliner can fill up pretty easily just in the first week and with the basic foundation. The outliner for mine is almost halfway filled with groups and just basic blocking pieces. I'm a bit terrified to see how much I'll need to duplicate and build for the final building. The part that's the most tricky seems to be the additional balcony for the second floor of the building. It's a bit confusing how to modular model it out. Such as whether or not I should modulate the entire floor or should it just be pieces that match the length of the windows or door. But that would take a lot of pieces and it seems easier to make the entire floor. In the end, I compromised and split it by the railing intersections (the columns) and make it fairly larger than the window or door pieces. 

The door piece is pretty big, but 3 meters was still a bit short for the human figure model and I didn't want to go into decimals and I shrugged and went up to 4 meters in height. Well, the Montgomery Residence is supposed to be a manor of sort right? So it would make sense if the entrance door is pretty big. At least that the reason I hold for why the pieces are kinda big. I can't help it. Next week, we'll go more into modeling and start UV-ing (hopefully). 

Poly Count for Week 1:

Modeling a Living Room Part 5

CAGD230: Living Room

Week 5 Final

Final Report: Now that week 5 is finally here, it's time to finish up this project. I've come to understand the artist's struggle with preferring the rough draft over the final one. I definitely think the scene looks better in the Maya editor than in render. To think the most time-consuming part of it all is the rendering. Not only does it heat up my laptop, but it takes roughly 10 minutes just to render each image. It's annoying because I see a lot of weird bugs in the final images. And trying to fix them takes forever. Yet I still have trouble with it. Searching online for answers is difficult as well because I'm not sure what to search and most of the time the solutions do not work. 

Total Approx. Hours Spent: 28 Hours (4-6 hrs a week) 

Problems encountered:

• Grainy Ambient Occlusion or Beauty Layer
• Attempts at a solution: 
• Increasing Render Sampling: takes too long to render and sometimes makes the image worse. 
• Mixing up settings in Lights: no difference or makes image worse 
• Masking the AO in Photoshop: somewhat works but the image is still a bit grainy 
• TV looks strange at different angles
• Attempts at a solution: 
• Changing Mesh Light settings: makes the TV look worse 
• Changing TV screen Texture: not much difference
• Using different angles: somewhat works

Moving Forward: It seems that the parts I have the most difficulties with are the Lights and Rendering. Taking this in mind, I will definitely take more time working with these areas. I should also ask for help outside of the internet as it's difficult to find the appropriate type of help online. It might also be best to try and render my images on school computers to see if it's faster because rendering on my own device takes too long.