FMP 003: House

House mesh: complete.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog post, you’d know very well that it is my job to model the house. I’m pleased to say that this has been accomplished. At first it doesn’t look like that much of a challenge building a house mesh, this is exactly what I thought, I was wrong. Unlike your typical background prop I can complete in a day, this ‘asset’ required a lot more thought in the construction process. The main concern I had with this asset was creating the exterior and interior to work together. Most props I make only need the exterior to look good, I’m able to hide a lot inside the actual mesh. Obviously, my workflow can’t be the same as you can essentially see inside the mesh.

To insure I didn’t run into any problems later on down the line, I planned quite thoroughly how I would build the house mesh. The first day of the week was spent looking up existing houses I could use as reference, making sure structure/architecture of the house made sense not only in the real world, but also in a playable game environment.

To make things easier I decided to separate the mesh depending on what textures it would use. The walls, the roof, the ground. Simple. The only problem would be the sub groups that would be attached to each mesh. For example, the tiles of the roof (would I model them, or use a tileable texture?), the skirting board on a wall. This is where things got a little complicated.

I found out later on that it would be beneficial to plan out what kind of texture that house would use. This would help me better organise the overall asset. I settled on 3 tileable textures that I would create next week. Settling on this rather than splitting up assets into groups I simple changed the uv ids to correspond with the texture I assigned to it.