Historic Walls

I have spent this week making a start on our four week project to model and texture a historic building. I figured it would be best to start modelling as soon as possible since I have a strong feeling that texturing it will be a beast...

First off I trekked around Leicester photographing buildings suitable to the specification. They're actually hard to find because although so many of the buildings in town are very historic, it's difficult to find ones where you can view all or most sides, or even the roof.

Eventually I settled on using Guildhall house, but since it is a large building arranged as four conjoining buildings with a courtyard in the centre, I chose just to work on one. Since I was unsure of the measurements of the building I did a couple of sketches first to work out the basics for modelling.

During the modelling I came across a few minor problems which were then solved (welding vertices for the roof and making all 2nd floor rooms one object), it wasn't until after 3 hours steady work when I hit my first dilemma - figuring out how to re-shape the roof so that it doesn't intercept the windows.

I tried connecting edges multiple times, and changing the shape and angle of the centre of the roof (the part obscured by the 2nd floor rooms) but, although it worked, I was then presented with another problem - the horrible shaded triangulation effect thingy which I encountered similarly with my bin. Luckily, after posting a cry for help on the dmuga facebook group and making myself a cup of tea, I got advice from a 3rd year who suggested to press 'auto-smooth' since something probably messed up with the smoothing groups. One click and it was sorted!

Problem out of the way, I then continued modelling, discovering a few things along the way. The last thing I've done is spent time sorting out the back end of the roof with it's odd little chimney thingies on the side. And here is my building so far:

I'm starting to realise that when 3ds max is going well it can be rewarding and actually get quite addictive... but when something goes wrong or you hit a problem suddenly it becomes THE WORST THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD DAMN IT.

But it's fine. Everything's fine.