Virtual Environments Blog: To make a house, a home…

With the island shaped and the extra harbours constructed, it was time to create buildings that would go on the island. From my research into Ford Island I had a rough idea of what buildings I desired, Airport Control, Factory Facilities, and Dock based construction, vehicle sheds and military buildings, but I had also assessed the presence of civilian housing which were the models I tackled first.

Taking my reference image I created a simple box with the bottom side being the size I felt was proportional to the house in the image. I only estimated sizes and utilised the reference image outside of Max instead of bringing it in as a reference plate. This was to allow for a degree of freedom when it came to the modelling should I desire removing details or adding them. When I felt I had the box a decent size I transformed it into an editable poly and begun adding points along edges to connect them allowing me to extrude different sized elements on the main cube to match what I saw on the reference image.

Adding points was a new method for me; previously I hadn’t been aware of it, having used slicing, quick slicing, and insert loop, to get the desired area on a single side. The downside to this method was that you would cut all other sides as well causing increased polygon counts, the new method allowed for greater control over precisely where all extra shapes within the faces went. The way in which it worked was to select an edge (or multiple) and add a vertex (or vertices) to it you could then connect those vertices via the ‘connect’ button or leave them separate. Constructing the buildings in this way allowed me to create interesting extrusions on each of the different sides of the cube without concerning myself with affecting the polygons of the other sides.

Sticking with this method allowed me to make quite nice roof extras; I could pull out a thin square from the main building and then add vertices on the underside in order to pull down shapes which would be lowered to ground level to give the idea of supports for that extra roof/balcony feature. These were present in one of the houses, within the command building and even in the factory, albeit an upside down variation for the supports to be pinned against the main building.

Instead of relying solely on a texture for the windows, I chose to inset them and negatively extrude the inner polygons so that the windows gained an extra depth. Although I am aware that it may have been an unnecessary increase in polygon count I felt the added depth gave superior detail and chose to retain the notion throughout every building model constructed.

Every building crafted was done utilising a similar method. Notable extras would be the use of symmetry for the vehicle depot and command building so as to not have to construct both sides individually. The dock crane was designed to be able to move should we need it to in the background.

The next job is to add the colours to them; it will likely be through a myriad of texture fills.

You can't have too many screenshots of moddelling can you? You will likely think the answer is yes after the remainder of this post...

Not particularly exciting at the moment...

Extrusions to the front of me, extrusions to the back...

Completed a house, and in less time than most builders...

The extra posts at the front came out really nicely, although the edged faces make it look oddly better here

Front and rear of the house, looking I would say rather nice.

I had initially toyed with the idea of constructing gardens but dismissed it for the second house thus removed the first one.

In the middle of manipulating my roof.

Is it the front of the back? even I can't tell and I made the thing...

Now that is definitely the front, back, front...hmmm, the windows made it no clearer...

Both front and back now, the front has the indented section where the front door resides.

The command building, symmetry added and looking almost complete.

Ah, but of course extra roof pieces, I do like to add twiddly extras that plausibly are unnecessary, although it did now match the reference image.

Constructing a biped roughly the scale of a human to the building allowed me to work out the perfect stair height for the front entrance.

Finishing off the front with some extra windows, kind of looks like face the windows are eyes, the door a mouth and the ledges above the windows massive eyebrows...

A section of pipe...no one said the screenshots had to be exciting...

Half a building and all the pipe now fashioned into the guard rail on the upper floor.

Technically the doors can open, just another mildly pointless addition, however the realisation of that does help me grow as a modeller as I have a greater understanding of necessity in models.

So it did give me the understanding mentioned above...but I still went on to create the central garage doors...

A little flaring at the bottom provided a nice fixture point for the railing

Windows always seem to require twice as many points as windows...

Windows with sun visors...not sure that is a thing but the carefully modeled windows do look good.

The start of anything is always slightly lacklustre...its a box...

As with the downward versions of the roof pieces for both house and command centre, the extra roofs on the factory were build the same way

The chimney element definitely added a kind of factory vibe to this building.

The factory now in its near completion state.

Once more into the breach my friend, Brian. I. Ped goes forth once more to size up my stairs.

A building which tells planes what to do, hence the radio masts and watch area at the top

Never quite figured out what they were but if it is good enough for the real building this was based on, it is good enough for my building

More windows, by this point I was somewhat sick of building windows...although I pity the man who has to clean them.

A little lazy, but arguably always use the tools at your disposal, I included a spiral staircase rather than craft my own stairs.

Another lesson in using anything at your disposal the guard rail is taken and then modified from the earlier vehicle depot building.

My buildings seem to always gain faces... :( he is a little sad...

A loud speaker...sorry, a LOUD SPEAKER!

This is where I prefer fantasy over real, these were present in the reference image but having no clue what equipment they actually were I could just make it up