Architectural Brief

   So.. the four weeks we've had for our architectural project have drawn to a close. I finished this a couple of days ago, and although it's not amazing, I am quite pleased with what I have achieved.
 
   My biggest regret about this piece is that I feel I wasn't ambitious enough with my choice of building. I just chose this cute little pub called the King's Head. This thought didn't really occur to me until I was halfway through the mesh. I'm bad enough with stress as it is, and I didn't want to risk going back and finding something else, only to run out of time to do it. I regret this now, however only slightly, because I came across hurdles across the way, which may have prevented me getting it done on time had I gone back to make something larger. I decided that instead, I'd try and add details to make the mesh more interesting, such as lights, satellite dish, etc.
   The UV unwrapping for this mesh caused me much more headaches than it probably should have.. Thing kept going wrong or I'd have to edit parts of the model and reset my UVs. I did end up learning a heck of a lot from this though, so even though it was a pain at the time... I'm glad of it now.
   The tiling textures I actually really enjoyed. Well... I enjoyed the bricks and the roof tiles... I found the grouting incredibly difficult, as you can see by the tiling still on it. Creating all of the textures took a while, but it was worth it seeing it all on the building.
   Once I'd put all the textures on, I decided to make an alpha for the the sections connecting the lamp to the building and I was really pleased with the results. So after that I added a plane and put an alpha on to display the sign on the building.
   At first I found applying normal maps quite difficult. I used a tutorial off blackboard to figure out how to do it, and I followed it to the letter and it still wouldn't work for some reason. I was in the labs at the time and I wasn't the only one struggling with this problem. We were saved though when a helpful second year student showed us what had gone wrong, and it was as simple as changing how the materials are shown in viewport.

   So overall, I am really quite pleased with how this came out. It's simple, but I think the textures and the normal maps made it look a lot better.