08/02/2020: Remember when I posted that I'd put more designs below once I'd refined the look? Well, as it turns out, my teacher had other plans.During the lecture yesterday, we as a class were given an hour to create a blockout of our shop, which we could then spend the next hour porting into VR to assess visually. This did come as a bit of a shock but, luckily, I remembered my rough designs and I was able to create a completed rough blockout within the time limit.The time limit and the unexpected task was, in all honesty, a pretty good idea: it forced everyone to buckle down on what they wanted their shop to look like, and immediately call on their knowledge of reference and scale. For me, for example, I knew I wanted a long cylindrical window, and looking at reference images I knew I would need a fairly big chimney, etc. My final blockout after the hour was up was this:
I decided to start with modelling the generic tall, thin Victorian London building: easily done by just making a rectangle and stretching it out, then rotating a cube 45 degress and putting two oblong rectangles atop it. I added another rectangle and three small cylinders for the chimney, and then I was basically free to customize.I decided that the doorway would be easiest to model, given the time limit, on one side of the building. Thinking about the practicality of this design now, as I write this post, it's actually a pretty good idea: it gives more floor space to the interior, and with the long cylindrical window showing off the merchandise and letting in light, the shopkeeper can put as much of his stock on display as they want.
After the time ran out, my blockout was exported and downloaded into Unreal, and I was able to get a view of it in VR. I was in the VR room with my friends Emily and Sasha, and my Diagon Alley neighbour Josh (the man who will make the shop with the plants). We all had a bit of a laugh actually setting everything up, especially when Sasha's controllers connected and she wailed 'Ohhh I have FINGERS?!' When everything was set up, I got a look at my building, and I was rather happy with how it had turned out for such a rough concept. I sadly didn't get any pictures of me, but I got some pictures of my teacher also having a look at the shop in VR.
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This picture shows the building on display in Unreal Engine, before it was displayed in VR. The engine is really helpful for actually seeing the scale of the model: in my case, I hadn't quite got the height and size of my blockout right.My idea for scale wasn't too far off, but the building was too tall and the doorway was too big. The funniest thing for me was that the front step came up to my shin, and to show my comedic mastery I nearly fell over while pretending to trip over it.
This picture is of my teacher Jon, who has just realized how tall my shop is.Along with the accompanying 'woah', I got the point pretty clearly: the shop was not quite proportional. I was able to try on the VR a second time and made detailed notes on what to correct.The main fixes were needed for the roof and the doorway, as once those were to scale the rest of the blockout could nicely fit in around them. The roof would dictate the height of floors and windows, and the doorway would indicate the relative size of people.
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I spent the next day working on said corrections. I have to say, I was glad I had the foresight to keep a separate version of the blockout where I hadn't merged all the components together, otherwise moving the stuff around would have been such a nightmare. I moved all the sticking out parts down a certain amount and pulled the top of the main building down. The roof I kept the same size, I just moved it down a bit to rest on top of the main building again. I then shrunk the rectangles framing the door, and moved them so they sat in roughly the interior of the doorway I'd had before. The final tweaks were to the large cylinder window: I pulled the base of the window down to the ground, because I felt it looked more stable and matched a style I'd seen on the Ollivander's shop from Diagon Alley.The tweaked version looks like this.
And with a comparison:
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