Progress Update

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about "building environments" - something I've touched on a few times now.

What does that even entail? Well, sometimes It's relatively easy and takes a whole 5 minutes. Sometimes.....

The majority of environments (outdoor, buildings, whatever) are based on assets - basically something that someone sculpted, modeled, and put up in a store. The problem is, a lot of these often work good as a base, but they're not right for what you actually want. Other times the general modeling/geometry is good, but the actual look...... so, here's two I've done for this release. I'll show the before and after.

First, the main room for the free roam I'm currently working on (Note: I took these shots before I started working on it, and I'm glad I did. I noticed a number of things I wanted to fix/add/address, and those were done before I began building the actual renders. They're not fixed in these shots, but that's not very important.)

Those 3 are the inside of the "main" room. The entire environment is much larger - note the doors, those lead to hallways and additional rooms which aren't part of these images. The entire building I actually sketched out the entire design and layout before I began which made this entire process a lot easier.

Now the before shots:

I will note - I actually like the look of the original quite a bit - but it just doesn't work for what I was doing. But you can see the differences - the fireplace is gone, solid walls replace the glass doors, a "DJ table" was set up, the walls were totally redesigned, doors added where they needed to be, a lot of the furniture is gone and/or replaced, the smallest change was to the upper balcony, while the lower floor got quite a bit of work. It's also sort of hard to tell in those shots, but the overall floor space was increased quite a bit as well. After that I did all the aforementioned work building all the hallways and additional rooms.

If we ignore all the extra rooms, this entire build only took about half a day. Most of that was just redesigning all of the walls, adding the doors, and I ran into a bit of trouble increasing the floor space. But overall while you can see the similarities, you also notice the differences. But overall this specific build didn't take too long. On the other hand...

The main campus. So first, the before shots.

Well, the actual buildings are ok.... but the rest - wow. Well, let's check the after then.

(bonus night shot:)

Ok, now that's quite a bit different. The main buildings didn't receive too much work - just changed the floors and the inside walls, and added some lights. The rest though.

I removed basically everything but the buildings and benches to start. I added my own ground, complete with grass that.... actually looks like grass, trees, sidewalks, lamp posts, trash cans, a statue, and the entire parking lot. The parking lot was the most custom of it all - I had to actually paint and model the entire thing myself since I couldn't find anything acceptable to use as a base. This entire build took a few days to put together - getting the ground (grass/trees/sidewalk) correct took the most amount of time. Parking lot next, then the rest was a bit quicker. I also added some details that you can't see in these images (In fact, so far they don't even show up in any renders, so I'm not sure why I added it!) like a recycling symbol on the trash cans, a "Welcome Back!" banner in the front lobby, There's also a number of floodlights attached to the buildings I added - which so far I haven't used but if I ever do anything on those areas of the building, I'll be glad they're there.

So, that's the basics of it. When I say "building environments" it really does mean very different things. Sometimes it's simply a matter of loading something up and making a few cosmetic changes. Other times it's a LOT more work and effort to get it looking the way I actually want to - and sometimes just nothing exists I can use as a base, so I have to build the entire thing myself.

So what about actual Progress? Well, I'm currently finishing up the major free roam for the chapter. I've finished everything else leading up to it, and we're closing in on 800 total renders so far. Once I finish this free roam (likely this weekend. The entire thing is about 400 on it's own. about 1/3rd are done, but the hard work was finished yesterday so I should breeze through the rest.) I'll take a day or two dedicated just to writing - as of the free roam I'm almost fully caught up to everything properly written, so I'll take a day or two to finish up the majority of what's left. After that I'll have a much better idea of how much longer to complete.

That's all for this week. I'll leave you with one more shot - this is a (not quite finished) actual render using that campus that I had built:

Oh hey, you *can* see the banner! Sort of. Well that's all for now. I'll have a lot more progress and hopefully a very rough eta next week, so until then - have a great week!