Following on from my last blog post, I carried on with making the entrance portal tile. I used the narthex portal tile that I previously made and removed one half of this tile. All I had to do now was add in some front doors, which I did by creating faces between the columns on each side of the portal. Once most of the geometry was tidied, I moved my player character next to this tile to get an idea of proportions. This helped me to decide where the door handles would go, while also referencing the height of the person in the photo above.
I finished the three story entrance first and moved onto the UV’s which were mostly laid out already due to using parts of the narthex portal tile. The only UV’s I had to arrange were the doors and the handles. Once I did this, I made the two story version in the same way, then I duplicated the doors with their handles and attached them to the two story version. These tiles were now finished after I went through the xView checks and set material ID’s.
Before I moved onto any modelling for the remaining tiles, I made sure that I was clear on how the vaults would be arranged and if I would need to make any new tiles. I snapped this area’s tiles together, which included the ‘stairs_right/left’, ‘three_story_straight’, ‘three_story_open’, ‘entrance portal’, ‘entrance_extension’ and ‘barrel_vault’ tiles. I found that it worked best to have another crossing tile which would link the vaults together on the x and y axis, which connected to every other tile. To make this west crossing tile, I duplicated the transept ‘crossing_tower’ and the transept ‘crossing_tower_ceiling’, and then merged these tiles together to make a ‘west_end_crossing’ tile. I finished off this tile by moving the vertices of the ceiling to snap to the top part of the tower and welded them together. The UV’s and material ID’s were already finalised as I used two finished tiles to make this one.
Now that I had arranged these remaining tiles correctly, I could move onto the stairs tile. I researched the anatomy of staircases to understand what parts I will need to be working on, as well as using the photos I took from the Natural History museum for inspiration. In the photo above you can see a labelled diagram that I will be referring to when explaining the parts I’ve modeled. Once again, I moved my player character into the tile space to check proportions when making the components of the stairs, especially the treads, risers and handrail. I then moved onto other details such as the starting and landing newels and a space for the balusters. Once I made some basic geometry for these parts, I put the finer details on hold so that I could come back to it later, once I knew how much time I would have.
I moved onto the part of tile where the three_story_open tile would connect to the stairs tile. There was a significant gap between the two tiles, so to fill this, I duplicated the ground floor part of the ‘three_story_open’ tile twice and snapped them both together. This created a nice opening to the stairs tile, which would also help me to connect the ‘barrel_vault’ tile. I duplicated the columns on the ‘three_story_open’ tile so that they could be placed on top of each other, reaching up to the ceiling. Once the middle part was finished, I duplicated the left side columns again from the ‘three_story_open’ tile and snapped them to the newly made entrance to the stairs. I could then create faces between the columns on both the ‘stairs’ tile and the ‘three_story_open’ tile to connect them together.
Moving onto the right side, I used the ‘three_story_straight’ tile as a placeholder for the new straight tile version I would be making for the west end of the church. As you can see in the photo above, there is a big gap between these two tiles like there was on the left side. To keep the ‘stairs’ tile consistent, I duplicated the left side columns from the ‘three_story_open’ tile again and attached them to each side of the new straight tile, as well as to the right side of the ‘stairs’ tile. This then left a smaller gap where I could create faces for the wall that would connect the two tiles together. Once this gap was filled, I finished off the straight tile by duplicating the clerestory part of the ‘three_story_open’ tile, and snapped it to the top of the new straight tile. As I was in this area of the church, I decided to move on to the entrance extension which would connect to the straight tile. All I needed to do for this was duplicate the columns and piers of the ‘three_story_convex_corner’ tile that I created earlier on in the project, and snapped them to the corners of the entrance extension tile. I then just had to make sure that the inner walls would snap correctly to the entrance portal and add in enough floor to cover the area.
Now that the left and right side was filled in, I moved onto the gap where the barrel vault would meet the stairs tile. I duplicated the transverse arch of the barrel vault and snapped it next to the edge of the original ‘barrel_vault’. This overlapped the wall on the stairs tile slightly, so I used the Boolean tool to create a union of these tiles, tidying up and removing any unwanted faces. Once all these gaps were filled, I could duplicate this entrance wall to the stairs and rotate it to snap on the other side.
close off first floor
After all these gaps had been filled around the stairs tile, I noticed that the aisle of the ‘three_story_open’ tile was still open and needed to be closed off. As I had made a dead end versions before, I duplicated the closed off aisle wall of the ‘three_story_deadend’ tile and made it into a separate object. The ‘three_story_deadend’ tile couldn’t be used with the stairs tile as the triforium gallery needed to be accessed from the top of the stairs. In the photo above you can see the highlighted ‘aisle_closed’ wall snapped to the ‘three_story_open’ tile.
With plenty of time leftover, I moved onto the finer details of the stairs and tidied up the geometry as I modeled. I wanted to add in more detail for the balusters, so I took inspiration from the Natural History Museum staircase. I duplicated the area where the balusters would connect to the stairs and moved it away from the tile, so that there was more space to work with to see this part clearer. I started by creating basic shapes which would represent small column-like balusters that would be placed in pairs, similar to my Natural History Museum reference photo. These small columns could then be duplicated onto the other parts of the stairs to save on time, making sure they all fit correctly. Once all the xView checks were corrected, I finished off this tile by arranging the UV’s and assigning material ID’s. Once I had stitched and arranged certain UV faces, some of the geometry could be duplicated like the columns and balusters of the stairs, instead of working through each of the individual UV faces.
The last tiles to be finished were the tower extensions and ceilings. This was quickly done by duplicating the top part of the ‘stairs’ tile and duplicated upwards. As the UV’s were finished, all I had to do was assign new material ID’s to condense number of materials. To create the ceiling, I could select the border of the extension tile, and use ‘Cap’ to create a face to fill in this border. I then detached this face and connected vertices in a way that UV’s could be separated to fit within the 0-1 boundaries of the UV editor. The UV’s and ID’s were sorted, so I could now duplicate both of these new tiles and mirror them to create the left versions. As usual when mirroring tiles, I reset the x-form and flipped the faces to correct the faces orientation, then flipped the UVW faces to finalise these left versions of the tiles.
I have now finalised my schedule for the next 3 weeks of my final project with clear milestones for each week. I have also finalised my tile list which consists of 53 tiles. 27 of these tiles are for the three story version, 16 tiles are for the two story version and 10 other tiles that can be used for both versions. I removed 5 tiles which included the ‘floor’ tile and the ‘three/two_story_closed_left/right’ tiles. I have managed to use enough floors in tiles so that they all connect properly, so no space is needed to be filled. Even though the ‘three/two_story_closed_left/right’ tiles will no longer be used as a final modular asset, they came in very useful when creating the ambulatory tiles. Now that all my tiles are modeled with correct UV’s and material ID’s, I now have a week to texture them and correct any smoothing groups if needed.
Photo References
IMGLABS.CO (2019) "staircase-parts-crossword-components-of-stair-stairs-requirements-a-good" [ONLINE] Available at: http://todayview.co/ideas/ [Accessed: 22/03/2019]
Nilsen, R (2017) “vezelay-narthex” [ONLINE] Available at: https://richardnilsen.com/2017/04/17/the-cathedrals-of-northern-france-part-7-vezelay/ [Accessed: 22/03/2019]
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