Following on from my previous post, I decided that my first task would be to make the mirrored versions of the ‘three_story_deadend’ and ‘two_story_deadend’ tiles. I did this by duplicating the dead end tiles that I already made, mirrored them both, then reset the x-form to fix the faces orientation. I then flipped the faces, then flipped the UVW faces in the UV editor, making sure they were still within the 0-1 boundaries.
Once these tiles were finished, I made a start on the tiles shown above in Image 6. This included the parts of the east end of the cathedral, such as the ambulatory, apse and radiating chapels. While revising the moodboard of floor plans I made in my second blog post, I gathered reference photos for this part of the cathedral. I discovered that some of my modular base tiles didn’t make sense, or I couldn’t find any reference photos that matched parts of my tiles. I think I relied more on the floor plans I found when making these base tiles, now realizing that I should’ve spent longer researching the ambulatory. After doing some more research and collecting more photos for the moodboard, I started to piece together some of these base tiles to make new variations, so that they would work with the modular tiles I have made in the past few weeks.
Camille Tecson said that “the creation of the ambulatory helped to accommodate the growing number of pilgrims. In this arrangement, the aisles flanking the nave were extended alongside the sanctuary and around the apse.” Radiating chapels off the ambulatory also helped to facilitate the flow of pilgrims. (Tecson, 2016) I noticed that in my floor plan moodboard, every floor plan shows radiating chapels, so I made sure this was a solid feature of the ambulatory tile. More radiating chapels could be used in place of aisle tiles if this was desired.
On the left of this photo, you can see the two new assembled tiles that I made from the original base tiles in the rest of the scene. These new variations were made up from 6 of these base tiles, that are highlighted in light purple, whereas the tiles in grey were put aside as I was sure I wouldn’t be using them. I decided to make one three story version and one two story version, so that I could still offer enough variation in the tileset.
I started this new tile by making the apse. I used columns that had been made before and placed them in the appropriate place to make a semi-circular apse. I then extruded the top of the columns and connected them together, which would make the arches between the columns. To make these arches, I duplicated and moved this part of the geometry away from the model, made the arch at the bottom, then used the bend modifier to curve the whole shape, so that it would fit between the columns.
Next, I duplicated the three_story_closed_left/right tiles, to prepare for attaching them to the apse. This would close off the three_story_open and aisle tiles which this new tile would have to attach to. In some of the reference photos, the apse is raised from the nave, with a few steps before it. So I extruded the outer edge of the apse floor and snapped the lowest edges to the bottom of the three_story_closed_left/right tiles.
In this photo you can see where I made the stairs which connected to the three_story_closed tile, also tidying the geometry periodically.
I moved onto creating the ambulatory area, where the chapels radiated from the walls. As I had already made these chapels before, I was able to duplicate and place them where they were needed for this new tile. Using the photos in the moodboard for reference, I extruded a ledge that would go around the top of the chapels, to split these walls up, as well as adding some windows in each area. As I had also made windows before, I was able to duplicate and place these where needed, using the Boolean tool to attach the windows to the walls.
After tidying this area, I snapped it to the apse and three_story_closed_left/right tiles, to start merging these shapes together. There was a small gap between these parts of the tiles, where the ambulatory walls met the outer columns of the three_story_closed_left/right tiles. I extruded the appropriate parts of both tiles so that they would intersect, then I used the Boolean tool to make a union of these tiles.
Once those parts were joined together and tidied, I started on the elevation of the ambulatory and the clerestory. Although the majority of my reference photos show that the ambulatory is elevated with groin vaults, I felt that I wouldn’t have enough time to model this geometry before I had to start on the UV’s and texturing. I had made groin vaults before, but to make this fit in with the ambulatory, I would have to adjust the vault tile a great deal anyway. To save on time, I created a barrel vault surrounding the apse, which can be found in a couple of the photos in the moodboard. I made this vault by connecting edges around the geometry, and raising it from the middle to create a semi-circular, dome-like shape.
To finish off this three story version of the ambulatory, I added some windows to the clerestory with the Boolean tool. I finalized this model by going through the x-View checks, and applying the correct smoothing groups.
Once the three story version was finished and tidied, I moved onto the two story version. All I had to do for this was to select the triforium area of the ambulatory, detach it and move it away from the two story tile that I would now be working on. I then selected the capitals on top of the columns in the apse and the arches and walls above them, then moved the faces down to snap to the top of the nave. This then allowed me to move the clerestory area down, snapping it to the top of the nave.
The parts that would make the two_story_closed_left/right tiles, were now overlapping and needed tidying. I deleted most of the top half as this wouldn’t be seen after adding in the barrel vault around the ambulatory. The vault used in the three story version could then be duplicated and attached to the new two story version. Some more tidying was needed to attach this area perfectly, then the two story version was finished, ready to start on the UV’s.
This photo shows the finalized models of the ambulatory, named ‘three_story_ambulatory_apse’ and ‘two_story_ambulatory_apse’.
The next week I moved onto UV unwrapping these tiles. As I had duplicated some parts of previous tiles to make this ambulatory, I assumed that the corresponding UV’s would already be laid out how I needed them. When unwrapping the UV’s for the three_story_ambulatory_apse tile, I found that a lot of the UV’s had distorted after adding in new parts of the geometry. So I decided to flatten all of the UV’s together to be sure that they would all have the same texel resolution. After sorting the UV’s and material ID’s, I had 45 materials for this tile, which would be renamed in Substance Painter to help me navigate through the Texture Set list. I knew that I wouldn’t have enough time to UV unwrap and texture the two story version this week, so I moved straight into Substance Painter to finish the three story version.
The first task I set out to do in Substance Painter was to rename all of the materials, checking that there were no problems in the UV maps and all the smoothing groups were correct before baking the textures. All the UV’s were fine but I noticed a few smoothing groups I had missed on the apse column’s captials. I went back into 3DS Max to resolve this, then re-imported the mesh into Substance Painter. This can be done at anytime in the texturing process if I notice anything wrong, but I prefer to make sure that the mesh is entirely correct before texturing. This means that I can bake the textures, adding an Ambient Occlusion map to the mesh, which “determines how much light should be blocked by a certain part of the environment.” (Stewart, 2019) This can be viewed in the Sketchfab viewer later in this blog post, as well as other texture maps.
Most of the textures I’m using for this tile are the same ones I’ve used for my previous tiles, like this brick texture. To separate this brick texture from the UV’s that have a different texture (is this case stone), I used a black mask on the ‘Brick Wall’ texture, layered on top, to only show this texture on the UV’s that need it. In the 3D viewer of Substance Painter, you can see on the right side of the wall I have correctly aligned the bricks on both of the UV faces, but on the left side the bricks aren’t seamless. I had to go into each material, find the UV’s that needed lining up and moved the texture to make it seamless with other UV’s.
The only new material I had to create for this tile was the ceiling/vault texture. As the majority of the cathedral structure is made out of stone, it was difficult to not make each part look the same. So for the vault, I used the ‘Concrete Bare’ texture as a base, then overlapped the ‘Concrete Dusty’ texture with a 31% opacity ‘Linear Light’ blending mode, both of which Substance Painter provides. I added a layer on top of these where I filled in the space with white to make the texture brighter, then added another layer to adjust the overall hue of the texture. This was then saved as a Smart Material and dragged onto each Texture Set with the ceiling in the UV map. Then on each ceiling UV, I added a subtle, dirt detail around the edges, carefully erasing any parts where I could see an obvious seam.
Finally, I darkened the parts of the chapels that I had done with the previous chapel tiles. I then used a rectangular brush to stamp chevrons onto the arches on the chapels, which can be seen in a lot of archways in Romanesque architecture. This is something I’d like to add into previous tiles I made, so I will be making time to do this towards the end of the project. I only had to do these steps once, as I overlapped all of the three sets of UV’s in one material.
The Sketchfab viewer shows the finished three_story_ambulatory_apse tile. To see the individual texture maps, you can click on the ‘Model Inspector’ icon in the middle of the 5 icons, found at the bottom right of the viewer. This will open up the Model Inspector, where you can find all of the material channels, clicking on these will show that singular texture map. You can then click on ‘Final Render’ to go back to the original object.
Throughout this project, I’ve underestimated how long the modelling and UV unwrapping would take, so I haven’t been able to offer the variety with these modular assets as I would’ve liked to. As I am now working on another module, I will have even less time to catch up with any work that I wasn’t able to fit in. For this reason, I’ll be aiming to finish just one variation (both for the three story and two story versions) of the east end and the west end of the cathedral, so that the assets can all be used together, with some variation in the nave/aisles and transepts.
I’ve given myself two weeks in my milestones (week 18 and 19) to add in any tiles that I find are needed to complete the environment, so this should give me enough time to finalize all of the tiles and add in finer details in I have time. I thought about giving myself an extra week to catch up on building assets, but this would mean that I would have less time to assemble and light the environment in Unity. I’ve decided not to do this because I know that from previous experience, the lighting can’t be rushed and I will need plenty of time to produce renders of the environment.
At the start of next week, I will be revising my assets and redesigning the west end of the cathedral, so that I can make a main tile for both the three story and two story versions that will work with the tiles I have already made. I will also be preparing for the presentation that I will be doing on Monday 25th February.
Bibliography
Stewart, S (2019) “What is Ambient Occlusion” [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.gamingscan.com/what-is-ambient-occlusion/ [Accessed 15/02/2019]
Tecson, C (2016) “HISTORY: Romanesque Architecture” [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.slideshare.net/ArchiEducPH/romanesque-architecture-history [Accessed 15/02/2019]
Photo References -
Alarmy (2019) “loir-et-cher-41-la-vallee-du-cher-saint-aignan-collegiale-ou-eglise-de-saint-aignan-deambulatoire-du-choeur-francia-loir-et-cher-cher-valle-s-k4napm” [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.alamy.es/imagenes/eglise-collegiale.html [Accessed 15/02/2019]
Arth 109 (2019) “ambulatory” [ONLINE] Available at: http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth109/arth109_sl19.html [Accessed 15/02/2019]
Britain Express (2019) “Lochawe-3678” [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.britainexpress.com/church-history.htm?term=Ambulatory [Accessed 15/02/2019]
carolinarh (2015) “m-ambulatory-and-radiated-chapels-in-st-denis1” [ONLINE] Available at: https://arsartisticadventureofmankind.wordpress.com/tag/ambulatory/ [Accessed 15/02/2019]
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Flickr Hive Mind (2019) “6329716077_38fff6104c_b” [ONLINE] Available at: https://hiveminer.com/Tags/ambulatory%2Cromanesque [Accessed 15/02/2019]
France-Voyage (2019) “church-saint-reverien-22398_w1000” [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.france-voyage.com/tourism/photos-church-saint-reverien-1849.htm [Accessed 15/02/2019]
Inglis, E (2019) “366-117” [ONLINE] Available at: http://www2.oberlin.edu/images/Art336/Art336e.html [Accessed 15/02/2019]
Sobrino, J (2019) “DFK46E” [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.alamy.com/sculpted-pilasters-at-romanesque-ambulatory-of-the-cathedral-of-san-image61271350.html [Accessed 15/02/2019]
Study Blue (2019) “e409dcaebf4188df5dd5df61aed55186” [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.studyblue.com/notes/note/n/exam-3-5-gothic/deck/1581342 [Accessed 15/02/2019]
Wikiwand (2019) “Choeur_de_l'église_de_Saint-Savin_DSC_1704” [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_regional_characteristics_of_Romanesque_churches [Accessed 15/02/2019]
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