14/02/2020: This update has been a little bit coming, but I think it's worth it.Last post, I had tried to adjust the scale of my building to be less 'towering' and 'skyscraper'y' to be more realistic in the setting of Diagon Alley. I had originally thought that my observations in VR, by putting my building into Unreal Engine, were accurate, but I tried a different method this week and I completely re-evaluated my choices.As a class, we were given an .FBX file of a scale man (in fact I'm pretty sure the man is the same as the default avatar in Unreal Engine), which when put into Maya measures about 1.8 metres (assuming the squares on my grid were in fact metres, but I'm fairly confident they are).
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This meant I could use the scale man to measure the size of my shop, and the result was not what I had imagined.
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The scale of my shop was way off. I hadn't used this man as a measure before and now I see that that had been a mistake.For comparison, I'm about 5 ft 10 inches tall, or 1.8 metres (so the same height as the scale man), and when I stand upright in my bedroom I come to a little over halfway up the height of the wall. On my build, as you can see in the screenshots, the man came up to half the height of the doorway, which should be much closer to the height of the man, and the first floor was nearly three times his height.This made me realize that my adjustments hadn't been enough, and I needed to rescale. I brought the height of the whole blockout down until each floor was about twice as tall as the man, and re-sized the windows and doorway to match. When I was finished, I realized that actually my worries about the building being too thin or narrow had been unfounded: the scale of the building had thrown off my perception, and actually there would not be as much of a problem.Here's a comparison of the three blockouts: from first, hurried assembly, to fixes made from VR, and finally fixes made with a scale model.
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To double check the scale of my shop, I asked one of my neighbouring shopkeepers to send me an .FBX. of their shop, which had also been cross-checked in VR and with the scale man. I imported the model into Maya and got this result.
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For some reason, importing her model into my Maya blew away the main building and the cylindrical window of my blockout: it isn't shown in the screenshot, but the rest of the shapes ended up scaled to a ridiculous size and transformed to the very edge of the screen. I'm going to assume this was a glitch in the rendering, and hope it doesn't corrupt my file: it's all backed up anyway, so there shouldn't be a problem, and the result was what I'd been hoping for.Both my shop and the neighbouring shop matched in height, and that was the encouragement I took to assure myself that the blockout was now an accurate size. If nothing else, even if our shops were both somehow sized incorrectly, we would look believable together.I then moved on to the next step of my modelling, which we had had a lecture on earlier. We were told to begin creating 'modular kits': sets of assets which can be repeated and tweaked to build a level. In the workshop, we were instructed to make a modular kit for a dungeon: in that time, I made a set of torch sconces and chains. After adjusting my shop blockout, I decided to do the same for my shop.The kit I have so far for my shop is pretty bare: it consists of a pair of frames for windows, and nothing else. However, adding these to my shop after refining the structure and shape of the blockout looks surprisingly good to me! This is my shop after adding more detail, so far.
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Looking at the shop now, I feel much happier with it. It looks tall enough to be three-storey, wide enough to actually be habitable, and the detail on the window frames makes it much easier to believe it is era-appropriate.I think the next step will be adding more detail to the walls, as after all, no shop is completely flat and bare, and I think a Diagon Alley shop would be a bit more chaotic than the rest of London. And, of paramount importance...is to make a SIGN! This shop still doesn't even have a name!
Updating, Improving, and overall, Shrinking!
Updated: Apr 24, 2020
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