#7 - Finished Blockout & Asset Breakdown

This week I focused on completing the blockout of the building, which gave me a better idea of what unique assets I was going to need to make to reach the finish line.

Within Blender I made heavy use of instanced/linked objects, which made figuring out which ones were unique much simpler. I threw on some basic colours, and added some bevel modifiers to the pieces, and already I think it's starting to take shape:

I then quickly brought it in engine to see how it looked in context with the scene:

At the moment, the entire house is imported as a single static mesh, in future I will probably need to break it down into the modular pieces and rebuild it. Having a kit to work with would also allow me to quickly throw together some background buildings if I wanted to.

I am quite pleased with the way this blockout has come together, and I feel like the proportions of most of it match up quite well with the concept. Obviously this is only a blockout, so most of the assets comprising it are very simple, the final assets will definitely have more geometry in places, and the sculpts and textures should bring the final version to life.

Foliage also has a big effect on the final image, serving in particular to break up a lot of the hard, straight edges of the wood and stone that are currently making it look a bit blocky, and not hiding the intersection of the building and the landscape very well.

The roof I have settled with at this stage is okay, but it doesn't match the concept's roof exactly. I found it difficult to match precisely, with the side of the house being seemingly narrower than the front, but the side roof's pitch still matching the main roof. Pitching the angle of the side roof more, or the main roof less just looked a bit off, so I settled somewhere in between.

With the blockout complete, I was able to break down the assets I would need to make into a spreadsheet, which can be found here: Asset Breakdown

Building Assets

Landscape Assets

This organisation is probably a little overboard, to be fair. I set it up with all the columns with the intent of making it easy to see which assets needed more or less attention, and how many extra steps and parts of the workflow they would require.

I probably could have set it up to be just "Asset", "Priority", "Done?", and "Notes", but time will tell if the extra detail here is valuable to me.

Next week, my plan is to pull together reference images for more specific elements of the scene, and collate them into a single huge PureRef board. My checklist for this is as follows: