15/3/2020: Since my last post, I've been getting stuck into some other assignments that I needed to pay close attention to, and I'd decided I was pretty happy with my blockout. In my last post I said I was going to add pipes to the wall with the large window, but I have since decided against that: I think doing so might make the building look messy, and thinking about it in terms of being a literal building, having loads of shiny copper pipes covering your display windows probably isn't such a smart idea. No one would be able to make out what you have for sale through them all.
However, I do have some very cool news. I know it's been a long time coming, but I FINALLY MADE A SIGN!
I went for a more pipe/wire look, since I felt it matched the general aesthetic of the rest of the shop. To clarify what it is: it's an eye, with a cog in the centre to mimic an iris. I thought it would be a cool blend of tech and mysticism.
The sign is hanging on both sides of the shop that face the main street, and here is a screenshot.
I have also been toying with names for the shop: nothing seriously sticks yet, but I was thinking of something like 'Oculus' or 'Oculorum': it sounds mystic but also like a piece of apparatus. It would also explain the eye sign...although of course I have yet to confirm this, and I have more important parts of the shop to focus on.
One of the downsides of me focusing a little more on other assignments is I have somewhat stymied myself: as I was happy with the build I began to try and UV map it, and I ran into problems. I'm not too sure how, and I'll probably talk with my lecturer about this to clear a few things up, but I started with the roof and found that the vertex points hadn't merged anywhere on it.
To air my understanding (which if wrong I need corrected): vertexes are the points that mark where an edge begins and ends. A four sided plane will have four vertexes, for example: if I wanted to extend an edge from that plane to make a corner, I should end up with six vertexes (this is because two of the vertexes are merged at the corner). It is this merging that forms a single shape.
What seems to have happened, at least with the roof, is that the vertexes hadn't merged. I genuinely don't know how, because I made the whole roof from one original shape, however I'm glad I caught on now because it can cause issues with the UV maps. It might be the case that the rest of my build has this problem: I don't think it will because most of the other shapes were made by making edge loops and then pushing or pulling the faces, but it'll be a thing to watch out for.
After fixing that little hiccup, here's my roof UVs.
When texturing, I plan to make the textures mirror each other to make it look like one piece, and then to flow underneath the roof and be hidden by the top floor (which I made invisible here in order to map the roof).
The moral of the story is: make sure your vertexes are merged. It is rather annoying if they're not, and takes a long time to fix.
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