The Image above shows how I had to map out all of the polygons, This was quite a tedious task the grey area shows the polygon data and the colour image shows the image data, they will be applied to over the top of one another to give my mesh some colour and texture. I found it increasingly difficult to manage my time when it came to creating all the textures for all of the objects/props. Throughout the process of building the town, I found a great way of producing all the required assets. I would begin by modelling the house or prop, then i would transport it into Maya 2009 and map out the UV maps, This was working to a fast pace so I continued on with the task and begun to paint the textures ready for the mesh/model. When all that was completed I finally applied some bump maps to give the bricks or slate tiles depth finally adding it all to the model.The great bonus I found whilst modeling Clapham was the use of 'Google Earth', this allowed me to scan for the house I wished to construct and look from a plan view down onto the rooftops. This gave me an ideal shape of the house to make, this was useful up until I decided to model the front and sides of the desired building, as with Google Earth there are no 3D views within the area of Clapham. So I researched into North Yorkshire buildings on image search engines and worked from the images i had collated. Although this was not an accurate build on the buildings, I still obtained the foundation shape i wanted for the houses. Once the whole procedure of creating a house was complete I would open up the window for Google Earth and look for the next building to make, then the whole model/texture process would restart. This was taking an incredibly long period of time to achieve. I would like to have modeled every house within the village but that will have to be another part of later production. Because of the sheer size of the town, I simply did not have the full amount of time to Produce each individual house. So after building at least a small portion of the town it seemed like a great time to start looking on Google Earth at the shape of the town therefor evaluating some of the houses that are very similar in shape and begin to duplicate the models.
After having done the repositioning of the houses I begun to bring life to the town by creating everyday props and surroundings. I created walls to connect gardens plus fences to divide living spaces. Then what I was really impressed with was the overhead cables and Television Aerials I created. They helped break up the skyline and give the town a more natural look. I also produced Bushes for garden walls and fences. I found a Great way of getting a realistic bush; I took an image of a garden Bush's leaves and eliminated the black from within the image, I also took a photograph of some old dry twigs and foliage and deleted all colours except for the twigs colour pallet. Then with a model i applied the texture of the leaves and began so shape the bush and give it some character. Afterwards i created an inside layer for the bush and applied the twigs texture to that then within the Material's Attribute editor I removed the colour black by applying a transparency telling the computer to remove all black form within the texture. This left the bush looking slightly transparent but the visible twigs and branches gave the bush some real volume. I did lay down some fallen leaves on the ground beneath trees, but when the time came to render out an image or small clip the RAM on my computer was abolished so i was forced to reduce the fallen leaves and try to turn it into a texture. The most difficult part of the whole modeling phase was the creation of the land, I could have found a much easier way of producing the ground but i was still learning at the early stages of the work. So how i began the floor at the time was started by creating the roads. I received the satellite data from Google Earth and applied the picture in 'Silo 2' then began to map out the road polygons. I did not want to have too many polygons in the final model, so i divided each small road section into a system where the road would not have as many polygons but the land outside
the road would be able to hold more. Here is an image example of how I done this:-The image shows how the road was divided so that there was still a selection of four sided polygons.
Once the roads were created I moved onto mapping out the small alleyways and paths. The great news recovered from Looking into sources is that Clapham had no pavements just hump shaped roads, so there was no requirement to create the kerbs at the roadside. At the final stage of the road mapping it was now that I had to move onto filling out the land, so Great time was used putting in all the polygons and splitting sections up so that there was a number of square polygons but not too many for a clean mesh. I had to figure out ways of splitting areas of the mesh into fours, sometimes I reached a corner of modelling and had Five or Six sides to a polygon. I thought back to the very first lecture the class received about Modeling Fundamentals and remembered about the small polygon tricks called "Terminators" they help divide a small section of the mesh back into fours. When all the ground was mapped out I shaped the floor into appropriate field patterns then moved onto levelling the land. I took some close analysis into the position of hills and mountains of Clapham and raised and lowered the floor to the correct height. It was increasingly difficult doing that as the town was on a steady slope, climbing into a steeper hill. I had to model the shape of hills in the ground making sure roads were still level and not twisted to one side.
The environment came together in a great pace towards the deadline I was gaining on the clock and almost ready to begin the Animation phase. First I created a model of 'Stuart' (the game's lead Role) applied a rig to his skin finally textured the mesh and painted the skin weight's so he would animate accordingly. I imported Stuart into the environment and started to animate him and move him around the scene. Luckily before i was required to do any modelling for the project, I made a 'Land Rover Defender 11' and implemented that into the scene. I had a large problem when it came to rendering the final movie, the images for all the textures were at a really high crisp image size. I was using a 2048 x 2048 resolution. This was giving the textures some really high end results but this proved to be a downfall in the final look of the movie because the files were too large to cope with. I followed a tutorial on line and found a way of doing textures. This is what lead me astray so I had to go back and convert all the image files to half or double their original size, that lowered the resolution but improved the render times. The project could not have proved itself to more of a challenge, but i took that challenge seriously set myself a goal and reached everything in the learning agreement I wanted to.
