Architectural Visualization

Using Kyle's white box as a direct reference, I got to work on modeling the watch tower. To create the spire at the top of my tower, i started with a cylinder and brought the number of subdivisions in the axis down to eight to create an octagonal prism. By extruding the top faces upward and shrinking them down, I was able to get the general shape of the spire. I then created two higher-poly cylinders for the bottom of the tower, stretching one to become an ellipse. I sewed the two pieces together, deleting any faces that would not be seen by the camera to keep topology clean. The largest challenge was getting the octagonal and cylindrical pieces to transition cleanly and naturally, so I had to subdivide the spire mesh a couple times and do some soft selections to accomplish this. Once the shape of the whole tower had been refined to a proper level, I booleaned out windows and insets, ensuring they were all contained within edge loops so as to contain any topological mess. Finally, I made appropriate extrusions on the spire, base, and underneath windows to create the proper level of detail. The house was made with a simple cube that I added an edge loop in the center to in order to create the roof. I booleaned out insets and windows where needed and then extruded pieces for proper detailing. The frames were made with simple cubes that I extruded, and the roof of the middle area was given a similar treatment. The chimney was also just a simple cube I made some insets and extrusions for. At the end, I beveled everything so there were no sharp edges and combined meshes, deleted history, froze transformations, and centered pivots on everything. UV unwrapping was an arduous task because of the booleans, but there were areas where I could leave it to tri-planar projections within substance painter.

Procedural Brick

A majority of the pieces of our tower are made of brick, so I decided to create a procedural brick pattern within substance designer for every team member to use. Thankfully, I have had a base substance to work from for some time now. Using my tile generator, I changed the ratio of the brick pattern and luminosity randomness. Taking into account the fact that these textures would be seen from so far away, I did not utilize a height map, relying firmly on normals for bump patterns. I decided to also remove a color randomizer that was overlaid in the substance because it would become extremely apparent that the pattern was repeating, so I left this randomization up to whoever was surfacing in substance painter. All I had to do after this was edit the color map to match our purposes better and publish the .sbsar for my teammates' use.

Surfacing

Inside substance painter, I made full use of my procedural bricks by importing it as a base material, changing the uv projection to tri-planar, and messing with the scale until each object's size was consistent and continuous. To randomize the colors, I overlaid a cement base, messed with hue saturation and luminosity, and added a smart mask so as to avoid the cement overtaking the brick. Simple glass mirrors were added to all windows because we were not interested in looking into the buildings, so we felt it was enough to reflect the environment. For the spire of the tower, I created another designer texture, this time for shingles. it's largely the same method used for the brick, only I had to plug in a special shape for the tile generator to use, and my color map was much more simplistic. Since this is so far away from the camera, I decided to make sure the height deformations weren't too pronounced. For the mid-roof, I was able to used Kyle's own shingle texture and had to make sure scaling was consistent between our pieces. Finally, once I had connected my textures inside the scene, I added renderman materials to any metals (gold balls, metal frames) and Kekoa's wooden and fabric decorations. In order to make sure all surfacing was utilized in a consistent way, I connected textures for Kyle and James. This took a good long while, but it allowed me to rest in the fact that I knew our hypershader was as clean as possible, only using what it needed to, and doing it exactly the same way every time. Thankfully, our textures were able to read quite clearly without any displacement maps, which also helped us cut down on render time.

Camera Movement

With our structure being so tall, I decided we should go with a vertical motif. As much as we could make landscape framing compositionally and visually interesting, it would make all of our textures and models too small to appreciate. Going with a 4:5 aspect ratio, I decided to take a worm's eye view so we could see the structure from a human perspective. I wished for the movement to be subtle, so I did a simple pan and rotation. I played with zooming in on the structure as well, but I found that the amount of motion became too much to handle for merely 5 seconds of screen time. A simple ease in, ease out was used to make the movement natural.

Lighting

Being an outdoors scene, I decided to take a more minimalistic approach to the lighting. Starting off, I found a high quality HDRI of a field during sunrise, brought the exposure up to .5 and the intensity down to .5, and changed the color of the light to a dull periwinkle so that the HDRI on its own would not create enough light for the scene. I then added a distant light, tinted it a rich yellow-orange, and messed with the angle, intensity, and exposure until I reached the desired sunlight angle. Finally, I added a soft, pink rectangle light to create a pseudo-three-point lighting system. To lower the intensity of the light on the base house and match the angle of the distant light, I had to rotate the HDRI in the y and z directions, making the ground plane technically tilted. Sometimes you have to break physics to create the illusion of physically accurate lighting.