Like most people I have done a lot of covert lurking around here for a few years. Thought it was time to get some feedback while I work on the diner model which will be going into UDK. All feedback suggestions are welcome, looking to get a well polished portfolio piece out of this model.

Reference:
Based off an old diner "or least I think thats what it was, maybe theater??" in Seaside Oregon.




Model





Started working on windows and doors

That is an epic building! I love it!we dont get anything like that in england

im excited to see more!

Just make sure you really nail that blue material. You get that thing perfect and you're halfway done!

Yeah that materials going to be tricky, I think it's actually a stucco building if I remember right. Just not sure if that kind of fine detail is going to carry well with Unreals mip maps I may have to force it to never stream the texture. So it shows from a distance but on the bright side that should be a few weeks out

You go to an Art Institute, Apophis? This is very similar to a project my me and my classmates are working on, art deco buildings.

Edit: Hehe, nevermind just checked your profile.

I wouldn't worry too much about making this building look "stucco" unless you're going to have some close up shots (you can't tell at this distance from the reference, reproduce what you see not what you want to see). Just make sure you get the right spec and spec power values. The material shouldn't be too hard, but make sure you adjust your lightmass settings so that your shadows give the building the right sense of scale. In the reference you'll notice the shadowing is really soft since it's an overcast day. You'll want to adjust your settings for your light under light>lightmass and tweak the shadow settings. Some lighting can be tuned in the world properties too. So i guess i'm taking back my previous statement about the material and saying you gotta nail the lighting, haha, the materials actually pretty simple

Yeah I do, graduate in June.

This looks like a fun one!

best way to approach this (any any asset imo) is to decide what you want to be unique and what you want to tile. from there you can save yourself alot of back and fowarth work.

if i was doing this. id have a tileable for the bottom floor. and one for the top floors. then another for the silver band around the building. from there you can break parts off that need to be unique and detail/map those seperately.

i like to think 6m tall gets a 1024. so id use a 1024 for the botom map. and a 512 for the top. probably a 256 x 512 for the silver part.

this ofcourse if all suggestions. you might have limitations or guidlines to follow. but if i was asked to build this. id do it this way.

Little Update see top post

Looks good. Keep it up. Love to see when it is finished

Finished modeling the building, time to add utility boxes and little stuff like that.



Also a test in UDK which helped me find a few verts not attached.

I think you could throw more tri's at this thing, very subtle chamfers on edges can really help the hard pixelation, and you gotta get smoother curves on that building for this to look next gen. Polycount really isn't much of an issue these days, for something this big it deserves more tris!

Blockin looks good though, always fun to see this stuff in engine.

Thanks for the feedback crazy, I am keeping it on the lower end of the polycount just because the rest of the models in my little demo level are lower poly. But I will leave the rest of the level for a later post when it's further along. Good to know I can go higher with on the polycount though. I have a habit of modeling low poly comes from years of everyone telling me model lower poly, need to break that habit.....

Any advise on making the wall texture not tile as bad? Without combining another texture with it in Unreal, because that's what I am about to do.....

The building looks like a lot of pieces can be reused using the same base textures. ex. The rounded sections on top.

Also your building is not set up like the one in the reference. It looks like you mirrored it and flipped where all the doors and stuff are.

also that texture you have on there right now is ugly. Use something more like what you plan on using in the end. This could all easily be on one texture page if you do it right.

I think you have too much going on in your material, seems a bit over the top for a building. When you look at most all buildings or walls, they're a single color with some very repetitive bump, or in our case normal maps. You might try just zapping out your diffuse and your spec map and using a flat color, let the normal map and lighting do the work for you, should reduce the tiling a lot to boot. You can get some grunge on there using some decals (wave of the future), and you wont have to worry about UV's, just slap 'em in the nooks and crannies of the building.

Here's some photreference you might find useful in conjunction with xnormals in photoshop to get a quick normal for the building:
http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php?t=browse&q=1142

You can get a 256x256 tileable texture out of one of those, slap it on the building and just tile the hell out of it, again slapping on some decals later for details.

Alright thanks again guys, I will give that a go. The building is mirrored, the way it was modeled did not face the camera when it comes though. So I had to flip it around the other direction.