Work in Progress: The Courthouse

I could easily go over what features I like about Ogre and which I like about UDK and which I would like to see and which I find annoying.  I have gone over this already pretty much as far as I want to, so unless a new contender pops up I am not going to say much more besides small status updates about what I am learning in which engine.  This week was nothing, I forgot about Friday night's post since I was real rushed with Christmas Eve being the next day.  On the up side, since I will not be talking about engines and the like for a little while, I will focus more on the game art, which at least looks like more progress than just saying this or that was programmed, I promise.Another thing I did not notice is that many 3D objects are not modeled in a sitting or two but spread out over the course of months, so I will be doing a series of work-in-progress updates.

To the left is my current piece I am making for the game, the courthouse entrance way.  Obviously I am missing most of the building, but this will be the focal point of the building so I wanted to give it my attention before moving onto the rest of the building.  My goal is to make it as low poly as possible, but since this will be a unique building, and I may want to reuse some or all of it in other projects eventually, I am giving it some extra polygons (polygon face count is currently about 2100 for just the entryway).  Now this is more of a status report than a final release and much of this model may change between now and the model which I will include in the game.

Going from top to bottom I am going to give some of my own critiques of what I would like to change or aspects which may be altered.  I am fairly happy with the scales on the top of the building and because in no game I can really think of the player could get close enough to tell me which polygons are out of position, I think it is fine.  Next is the parallelogram roof.  During texturing the circle in the middle will likely be turned into a texture to save on faces.  There is a star in the middle but the star is very hard to see since there is very little way to light it and cause shadows.  Along the bottom edge, I would like to make a molding which I could possibly reuse as the roof's molding.  The columns are fine, but base just do not seem right to me, they may look better once everything around hem gets filled in, but they just do not seem right to me.  I am fairly pleased with the decorations above the doors and the flagpole and holder on the wall, though obviously I am going to need to add a flag.  As for the doors themselves, they need handles of some form.  The stairs may need a little beveling so they are not quite as straight and a handrail in the middle to break up the long straight lines going across the stairs may also help the scene.  Finally on the base of the entry way, on both sides I want to make a high molding which I will then use throughout the base of the building to mark out the perimeter.

Now onto what still needs to be designed.  Two kinds of windows.  I want a large and a small kind of window, which will be spread around the building to take up most of the wall space.  At the corners I want to make a nice decorative piece so all of the detail is not focused at one point.  The molding at the roof and around the base have already been discussed but would be the last elements to build the lower walls.  On the roof I would like to put in a clock tower.  This will involve another smaller window, the clock piece itself and a molding separating the building from the dome.  Then once all of this is modeled, texturing can begin

Until next time,
~gunnah