WIP - English Town Hall / Square
TangoAlpha
Posts: 4,584
These WIP topics are getting popular! I've posted little bits of this around the place with regard to specific issues, but it seemed to be about time this project had a thread of its own.
This building is based on the town hall of a small town just outside of Oxford. It dates back to the English Civil War (mid 1600s), which puts it around 400 years old (NOT medieval!) Many of the surrounding buildings are of a similar age. Externally, it's in the context of the square, where it sits on a raised pedestrian island, surrounded on 3 sides by roads. The ground slopes up to the north west. Internally, there's a small downstairs room which has been restored to its earliest purpose - the town lock-up. The small cell is not entirely escape proof! (watch Pirates of the Caribbean for how to escape...) Upstairs, the first floor is currently empty, but I'm considering ways to furnish it (maybe a magistrate's bench and a dock...). The undercroft and paved island are ideal places for market stalls etc.
All doors and windows can be opened. Walls can be hidden for camera access etc. At the moment it's approximately 18000 polys.
Currently working on UV mapping and texturing. TBD: Road surface, surrounding buildings, horse trough, outdoor cafe, trees, bric-a-brac... I've also added a pic showing early work on the north range (coaching inn + shops).
I should also say, this is the first model I've built of any complexity. :-)
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Comments
Very nice!
Looks like you're doing a great job.
The city that I live in shouldn't really be called a city, as far as most are concerned. It's an old shanty town, most of downtown is made up of the original architecture from the early 1800s. Not as old as the building here, but still very nice. Over the past several years there has been a project going towards restoring those that need it to get them into a good state of usability. Our population is so tiny that most store fronts just sit empty of business, so they put things in the windows to make them look somewhat occupied.
looks nice - is it a free B you are working on ?
Lol, we think of 1800s as modern! That was when most of our cities underwent major expansion and improvement, particularly in housing - studies by Mayhew and Dickens pretty much defined our understanding of slums and ghettos, even today, and consequently much of the old medieval houses got torn down and replaced with the Victorian Redbrick that still dominates our cities today.
This particular town that I'm modelling part of has a population of around 8000. It's a Market Town, which means it has a charter from the king (in this case, Henry III, in 1218) granting it the right to hold a weekly market. That would have been in the same square that I'm modelling. Glass in one of the windows in the Crown Inn (the building with the archway & railings outside in my picture) dates back to the Wars of the Roses, 1387-1485.
Of course I'd love to sell it (I like being able to eat and pay the bills etc!), but that really depends on how well it turns out and if anyone wants it. Right now it's just a personal project and learning the ropes.
So nice to see someone making some British buildings. And I know what you mean about 1800s being modern. We live in a late 1880s type working mans (think miners or iron workers) cottage, and in the next village up there is one street with similar age houses which are called "New Houses" as part of their addresses, so you could live in Number 1 New houses, and so forth
Right, I know... but the early 1800s was the dawn of the frontier in this area. That's when people first came to settle here, and it has a very prideful look about it. They carved out their own city here and they were really proud to do so - and it shows in their buildings :)
I was the stone layer for a project done on Washington Island when we recreated a thousand year old church from Norway. The one guy made all of the wooden nails himself! So cool! I just had a small part to play. I wanted to do much more but my boss could only donate so much stone as expensive as it's getting now.
Hi Tim, Love your city/town, looking good!
We live in a Victorian terrace house built in 1850 that we have broken up into 5 flats. It's a Grade 2 listed building. Some day I hope the gov't will wake up and let us have double glazing, change the old skylight that will never stop leakibng, etc. We lose so much heat and our heating bills the winters we had cold weather here in the SW were ridiculous. In London the Parliament building is the same, it's a heat hog. We cannot touch certain things on or INSIDE the building at all. I believe in preserving the look, but large (6 foot by 4 ft) single pane windows in a city with modern noise, it's a nightmare.
There are STILL gad-zillions of places in the UK that have no street address, they are just called EG Rose Cottage, Camden Lodge, Hollings House, etc.
When we lived in the US in New England, there were wood houses still going that were built as far back as the early 1700s!
Keep building!
xx :) SileneUK
Hi Tim, Love your city/town, looking good!
We live in a Victorian terrace house built in 1850 that we have broken up into 5 flats. It's a Grade 2 listed building. Some day I hope the gov't will wake up and let us have double glazing, change the old skylight that will never stop leakibng, etc. We lose so much heat and our heating bills the winters we had cold weather here in the SW were ridiculous. In London the Parliament building is the same, it's a heat hog. We cannot touch certain things on or INSIDE the building at all. I believe in preserving the look, but large (6 foot by 4 ft) single pane windows in a city with modern noise, it's a nightmare.
There are STILL gad-zillions of places in the UK that have no street address, they are just called EG Rose Cottage, Camden Lodge, Hollings House, etc.
When we lived in the US in New England, there were wood houses still going that were built as far back as the early 1700s!
Keep building!
xx :) SileneUK
I feel for you over the double glazing, but sometimes that can be overdone. Our cottages are stone built, with 18 inch thick walls. Many have been refurbished and had uvpc double glazing installed and central heating, usually gas fired. This actually causes condensation problems and windows have to be cracked open for a while on all but the really worst days to allow a smidgeon of air circulation, which doesn't help with heating bills at all. :coolsmirk: One neighbour has just splurged out and replaced all the uvpc windows with hard wood double glazing, hoping that will improve the situation.
BTW, as to houses with names. Until we moved here we lived in a house called "Chohole Gate Lodge" and as it was one of the gate lodges of Richmond Park we originallly had no street address, until the Post Office decided it was going to link us to the access road outside the park to give the postman some indication of which area the Gate lodges were, as Richmond Park is large (outside circumference is 10 miles) and has quite a few gate lodges.
Thextures... how big should they be? When to tile... and when not to tile.
I appreciate that this is a massive subject in its own right, but I suppose it's better to err on the side of bigger - you can always shrink a texture later, without problem, but despite what CSI, NCIS etc would have us believe, you can't get more detail from making a texture bigger after the fact.
But then again, a 4096 texture would be wasteful on a door handle, while a 256 texture will be crude and blocky on a 36ft long wall. Plus there are other issues, like matching textures on adjoining surfaces. Take my town hall, the outside walls are all painted stucco - basically the same texture - but the walls are all different sizes. (although conveniently the building is laid out as a grid of 12ft squares, so they are all convenient multiples - 12ft, 24ft, 36ft.
So, I could make a 12ft wall from a 1024 texture, a 24ft wall from a 2048 texture (but now I'm wasting half the texture sheet - Carrara doesn't seem to let me make a 2048x1024 texture - and a 36ft wall from a 4096 sheet (Carrara doesn't give the option of 3072). All the walls would have the same proportions and pixel density (i.e. dots per inch) of the texture, but it's very wasteful, unless I can combine textures from multiple objects onto a single sheet, maybe? Or is this the time to think about tiling?
Oh, and I've had this error come up a few times:
The current texture size limit is not appropriate to the current scene. The texture limit has been reduced.
It happened while I was duplicating bollards across the ground. What does it mean, and should I be worried about it?
Tiling could be a help, as well as laying multiple objects on the same sheet.
Here's another thought: For some things, you may not need a texture map. They could be procedural shaders.
The error is most likely you bumping up against the limits of your graphics card. The final render is CPU based, but the assembly room is GPU and OpenGL. There's a little icon at the top of the Assembly room window that looks like an up-arrow within a circle. That is the Interactive Renderer and it only effects the Assembly Room view. Click it to open a window where you can set parameters. The default Texture Map size is 2048 which is the highest setting. It can make the Assembly room pretty sluggish sometimes when working in textured view. If so, or if you get that error, you may wish to lower it.
Maybe another possibility is texture spooling, which should be in your preferences (unless it was moved in C8.5). I think it's under imaging and scratch disk. I've read DAZ-Spooky suggest this should be set very low. You'll need to quit and restart Carrara for the change to take effect.
Thanks EP. Texture spooling is On. I'll try notching the texture map size down a level, to 1024. See what difference that makes. (btw, it goes way up, to 16384 in my version).
Okay, today's head scratcher. Trying out my 1x, 2x stuccoed walls. The 1x 1024 x 1024 wall built nicely, but the second wall is giving me problems. The wall is split into 3 parts, remarked by pillars, column and doorway. I UV mapped the 3 wall polys in EXACT proportion (see screenshots), yet two of them come out noticeably stretched. Any idea what could be causing it? The texture sheet is just a single strip of stucco, pasted from my 4096 master texture.
Now, while I could just make the big segment bigger, taking it right up to the door frame, it wouldn't solve the problem with the texture on the other side of the door.
Okay, so it was pretty bloody obvious once I applied a new day and a fresh coffee to the problem! What had happened was, in the uv map everything was rotated through 90 degrees. So I had everything in the right proportions, just sideways!
(why can't Carrara have a nice Atlas mapping mode like some other software? It would make things so much simpler.)
Anyhow, all hunky dory now. :-)
It's looking pretty nice :)
I agree with you. Atlas UV is very useful. In my columns I actually had to go to a trial error process until I got the good proportions cause carrara make the uv in the size of the grid (square). My columns are really high and thin, so textures would be all stretch... It's really difficult to do, just time consuming.
I've now found some grid patterns that really help with getting things lined up and even - just google "test grid texture". :)
Still going with the UV Mapping and texturing (& optimising the model too, & rebuilding bits here and there!)
The textures at the moment are essentially just "base" textures with no wear & tear (although I did play around with adding some wear to the stairs). Once I'm happy with everything at that level, I can start working on detailing...
Originally I just had a partition wall up on the first floor, with a little landing behind the bannister (great setting for lining up SWAT guys ready to storm through the doorway!) But then I had the partition hidden while I was working on the wall panelling (yes I know the texture is wonky under the windows), and I thought, hey why not extend the bannister rail through 90 degrees and take the partition out altogether. So that will now be optional!
The bump map for the panelling needs some work too. A simple greyscale of the diffuse was obviously not the way to go in this case!
Mapping the base, with its irregular steps is proving a bit of a challenge (although I think the roof will be a bigger one), but I'm getting a grip on it. :-)
Looking really nice Tim! I really like some of those shaders you're making. Fun, isn't it?
Very nice Tim!!! It's becoming really beautiful!! Keep going!! Can't wait to see the final result! :)
I's taken me all evening and most of the afternoon, but I've finally beaten the base into submission, and got a halfway reasonable UV map for it :-)
(only trouble, it's 2am & I have to work in the morning. Ho hum! I may need extra coffee...)
Hehe, cheers man! :sick:
Yes, um... Tim won't be coming in today... you see we, the federal government of Quambinoides require his services for.....
We want him alive! No disintegrations this time, Dartanbeck!
We want him alive! No disintegrations this time, Dartanbeck!
:ahhh:
LOLOLOLOL!!
Can you do that when I have boring social meetings too??? Like does kid's parties where my married friends just talk about babies and food and say I should hurry up to settle down too!!! lolololol
Didn't get much time for Carrara today - had to work late, owing to being a bit lacking in the morning department ;-)
So, played around building some simple props - a little 3-legged stool, and a wooden slop bucket. Ok, I didn't get the bucket finished - it still needs a handle and the, er, slops ...
BTW, is there an alignment function whereby I can select a bunch of vertices and snap them all to the same grid line? (i.e. give them all the same x, y or z value) - I quite often find this is something I need to do - flattening an arch, or in this case, making the top of the legs flush with the stool. Setting each vertex z value individually is a real PITA, and something that ought to be automated somehow.
Gorgeous... Truly!
Tania... we can try :) You just have to get us there! ;)
LOLOLOL
I send you my private plane!! :P
Nice done Tim! :)
Ah, if only my licence and type ratings were still current!
Great bucket!
Dart, do you know of a snap-to command? I'm not proficient with some of the less obvious tools.
Finished off the bucket before work. :-) Naturally the handle rotates...