tyronemw

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Reflective Evaluation

This project would quite challenging creatively as there was a number of factors I had to consider before determining a final concept, because I only had 6 weeks to finish this project, I knew I need to create something to my strengths as an artist, but also something not too complex.

When coming up with the idea initially, my first introduction to modular building was a brief search about what they are and what they can look like with my lecturer, after that, I did my own research after understanding the basis of what the final product looks like. I then used art station and google images by searching ‘3D Modular Buildings’ and added them to my mood board, adding more images, I started to get inspired by a few of the designs styles I would see.

There was some designs where there was a pub or a shop on the ground floor with apartments above which I was liking, so I did more research into that design choice, both in 3D and in real life, which made me come across this one pub in London call The Traitors Gate, I liked the modernness look of the building, nice geometry to the building and hard surfaces, without too many loose parts and materials, which ultimately became my reference for the project.

I find this method as a creative process works for me, as usually I feel like environmental artists font come up with their own ideas in practice, but use a reference to create, I’m not the greatest at coming up with brilliant and creative design ideas, I would much rather just create what’s in front of me, so in that sense the method of researching what is necessary for the assignment, and slowly narrowing down what I would like to create through images and a mood board, works well for me.

This project has made me learn about myself as an artist, the way I research, how I much prefer taking a piece of art or architecture and using that as a reference to create, much more than creating my own piece from scratch, the use of concept art is greatly important, especially as that can take a big amount of time in itself. Its also helped me understand more about the workflow of modular building, the use of trim sheets and how effective they can be, even more so than I originally thought, id like to go back to doing something similar in the future, maybe as a personal project where I can take a bit more time.

I'm happy as to where I have come from as a 3D artist, and moving forward I want to continue to grow, this project has shown me how to handle intense moments in short amounts of time, using every moment wisely with research, planning and creating, yet still being able to produce a high quality asset that I would always expect from myself.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 18 - 13/7/25

Final Renders

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 17 - 2/7/25

Just wanted to take some time to reflect on the project as a whole and my thoughts during the project, and what I can take away from this assignment.

I enjoyed the intensity of this assignment as it was only 6 weeks I had to complete it, that meant I had to be very cautious and careful with the planning, I knew I had to dedicate a lot of time per day with this project, and even more so as I had effectively lost a week as I would be travelling away on the 4th till the 11th, and with my weekend job too.

Looking at it from a creative stand point, coming up with an suitable idea was quite a tough feat as there was a lot of variables I had to consider before settling on an idea, I’m usually someone who bits a little more than they can chew, and attempt something I would say is a little out of my skill level, I believe sometimes that it is a good thing in the long run as that’s how you can learn new things and new skills, however with this project you don’t really have the time to learn new skills and techniques. Knowing this it made sense to create something to my strengths, lots of hard surfaces, modern architecture, with a lot of modelling, geometry, and hard edges. With this style, also meant I would enjoy creating this building, as if it was something the complete opposite, I may find myself not enjoying it as much, and in turn the quality would diminish.

During the project, everyday was quite and intense day, some days I would find myself putting in around 8 hours of work, most of the time spent was perfecting the modular aspect of the building, and making sure each part fits flush with each other, and just the modelling part as a whole. I tried to keep the material making to a minimal as I knew that for me personally this would take up a lot of time as I am not the quickest in this area, so this was something I also had to consider in the designing process.

I would liked to have added some cube mapping to the other windows if I had some more time to play with, I feel like there is a little bit of emptiness at the top half of the building, the cube mapping can be very effective and it works really well on the ground floor, so adding that to the top half i believe would really liven up the building more.

Overall, it was a very interesting experience given the time constraints and limitations within the assignment, I felt I’ve learnt a lot about how to approach and navigate the design requirements within the set amount of time and how I can achieve the best I can without making too much sacrifice in other areas.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 16 – ��1/7/25

Project completed! Today I’m hoping marks the day I will be able to say I have finished the project, looking over everything I’m actually very happy with the way it has turned out and the overall look and feel of the building, I do need to create a few cinematics and generate some 4k images, but that I think is the last thing I now need to do before submitting the project!

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 15 – 26/6/25

I had come to a creative decision when creating and designing the floor, if I wanted to take the time into creating a new floor material or use a material from Fab. I was thinking that it is always better to create as much as I can myself, as I don’t want to use to much from Fab, but I was also thinking that the floor isn’t really to much the focus of the project, it’s the building itself that is the focal matter, the floor is more just to enhance things a bit, I also thought that I’m running low on time and only have a few days left available to work on the project because I work on the weekends.

In the end I came to the decision that I would use a material from fab for the street material and use one of my own materials as the road material that I had previously made from another project. I feel like that would be a good compromise for the project. So, I used a nice Stone Tile material created from the user voloshynova[1], which is fitting for the style of the building, as well as my own asphalt texture I made from a previous project for the road material, which in the end was very happy with the outcome and think this was the best decision to make for me.

[1] https://www.fab.com/listings/a7c28653-f62b-40d6-9dad-481ebe907036

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 13 & 14 - 25/6/25

With the project slowly coming together and coming towards the end, the last two days was spent adding and changing so small bits, I created a glass panel material within painter for the glass panels on the building, added some flowers by the windows, admittedly I’m not as strong on foliage as id like to be, so for this I found some high quality free assets within Fab, the flowers by a user called BernzisWorld[1], and the greenery by a user called PineCore3D[2].

This was very helpful as this saved me a lot of time rather than creating them from scratch and even more so as it isn’t my strongest area in 3D. Something else that saved me time was reusing the material from the ground window front panels for the sun covers material, which worked very nicely together as I was thinking about making a cloth type of material, but actually in the reference images and mood board they actually are made of metal anyway.

With all of those last few bits completed, I want to say the building now is complete, I always cant help but feel I’m missing something, I know I’ve yet to create a found floor for something the building can sit on to give it more of a sense of being rather than the building just floating on nothing, but tomorrow I will come back to it and look again to see if I can recognize anything I may have missed!

[1] https://www.fab.com/listings/06df28e4-8c5f-421e-b9ad-d261dca15c5a

[2] https://www.fab.com/listings/7aa74642-2f55-4568-89e4-a362b9b51eab

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 12 – 21/6/25

Got home from work today and was actually excited to see if I could get this cube map technique to work, this is what I was talking about at the start of these blogs about enjoying the work and being immersed in the project, I find when I’m in this mindset I get my best work done.

I found this tutorial by The Game Dev Cave[1] who explain played pretty well what a cube map is, how it works and how to create it, using his method, opened up a scene I had used before for another uni project to practice lighting, I was a free package from Fab I had acquired a few months back. Using this scene, it saved me a lot of time as the scene was already made so the hard part was already done.

Using the Cube Render Target feature in UE5 I created my Cube map texture, added the texture to my building project and made it a material to add to a plane. I was very surprised as to how easy it was to create, and the outcome looked very good! I ended up taking three cube maps with the cameras in 3 different locations in the room to give off the effect that depending on which window you look through you see the relevant perspective of the room inside. I think it’s a pretty piece of technology for gaming and works incredibly well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@thegamedevcave

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 11 – 20/6/25

With all of the building brick work with the trim sheet completed, I started work on creating a few more unique materials for the other parts of the building, the door, the flowerpot, the front panel by the window etc.

I had a conversation with my lecturer about my progress so far and things maybe I could look at going forward, and he recommended a technique called cube mapping for the windows. The concept seems very interesting, I have for sure seen in it games, but I have never actually attempted it myself from a developer’s perspective, I will spend some time researching this technique and see if I can attempt to include this in my project.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 10 - 19/6/25

Today was mainly spent doing a lot of UV Unwrapping and applying the trim sheet to all of the necessary parts of the building, UV Unwrapping is very time consuming, so I spent pretty much all day doing this to all of the modular pieces, once completed, I reimported the models in UE5 and created the material instance in engine.

I found where I had placed some of the UVS on the sheet didn’t look to great in UE5 in comparison to how it looked in Maya, so there was a lot of resizing and moving the UVS around and reimporting again, but I’m happy with the end result for today.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 8 & 9 – 18/6/25

Over the last two days unfortunately I haven’t had much luck, I’ve spent a lot of time attempting to get this timesheet correct and working but not too much luck. I first started with creating a plane with some designs and geometry with the intention to take it into ZBrush to then sculpt some more finer geometry and shapes, and export it back into Maya and then bake, however I came across many issues when attempting this.

After planning out the layout of the trim sheets and starting to modelling process, the first issue I came across was once I had my trim sheet sculpted in ZBrush and took into maya, I wasn’t able to export the high poly version as the number of polygons was too high, as I am running Maya LT, this version restricts any exports over 250k polygons, and this was even after decimation, so I had to change the decimation numbers to get the numbers under 250k. I couldn’t get a nice high poly mesh under 250k, so I ended up separating each trim to its own object and exporting them separately.

After exporting them into substance painter, I had a lot of issues with the baking, and also realized that all of the details I had made onto the object from ZBrush did not appear onto the bake, with this and the added fact that along this whole process a lot was going wrong I decided to take a step back and rethink this process. Rather than create the details in ZBrush, apply the details straight onto the material would be a much better idea for what I need. I decided to create another trim sheet, this time simpler, with the only geometry being the gap work between the bricks to create that depth. This way I wouldn’t have to worry about poly counts in ZBrush and I can take the whole plane straight to Substance Painter to bake the details straight onto the material. This process was much better and worked very well. After creating the material in which I saved some time on as I used one of the smart materials provided in Substance Painter as a base layer, I now have a trim sheet with multiple different sizes of stone patterns, that I can now use for the material and apply in Maya once I have done the UV’s!

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 7 – 16/2/25

I have finished the modelling! With the modelling part done, I Imported it into UE5 to see how it turned out in game and I’m very happy with it, with no errors flagging up and it overall looking okay, I was quick to move onto the next stage which would be creating the trim sheet for the building. I understand the importance of trim sheets and how necessary they are in games and for modular assets. So tomorrow I will start on this.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 6 – 12/6/25

With the modelling process near completion, I was more just messing around with some last parts and coming up with an idea on my first problem. The problem was that the corner pieces wasn’t connecting flush and would require a lot of work into correcting this problem.

Part of the problem is that the building is actually a peculiar shape, where one side of the building is connected directly to another building, and the other side is on the corner of a road at a 30-degree angle, rather than a 90-degree angle. Where I am creating a stand alone building with 90-degree angles at either end, I didn’t model in anticipation for a corner piece to connect the sides of the building together, and given the design of the building I thought it would be quite hard to incorporate this in its design. So, what it was I ended up doing was creating this connecting pillar piece that didn’t take too long to model but still looks like a part of the building.

I’m glad that this oversight happened as it showed me how easy it can be for these things to go unnoticed and how small moments like this can have such an effect on progress or design features.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 4 & 5 – 10/6/25

The last two days I have spent creating the blockout and pieces for the building, creating the block out while having to keep in mind that this building needs to be modular, I had to create the building a little bit more differently than usual and admittedly it took me a while to understand where each piece is going to start and finish.

The design of the building proved a little difficult in some areas, like above the door and ground windows, it was at this point I had a few different ideas going though my head. I could slightly alter the design so that it isn’t like for like in this area, this would save some time and allow me to get creative with some other designs, however I was also thinking I already like the design the building currently has to offer, and I would only be changing it because of a difficulty hurdle which I don’t really want to do. Another thing I that was going on in my head was the amount of pieces would I want to have for this building, or if there is an ideal amount, however looking at my mood board there are some designs that have many parts, which gave me the creative freedom to not worry too much about having to have too little or too many modular parts.

When continuing with the blockout and modelling phase, I made sure every single piece’s snaps together well as I understand that is super important when working with modular pieces, ensuring that ever pieces snaps with each other.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 3-  5/6/25

Today I’ve finished the mood board, and I have a pretty good idea of what style of building I will be creating. I compiled together a bunch of modular created buildings looking around on artstation, I looked at shop fronts, pubs, hotels and apartment style buildings, all with different themes and time periods. I’ve mentioned before I like a modern style of building, and with modern styles come a sleekness in their design, not so many tricky and technique architecture that comes with the more traditional varieties, with this in mind, I came across this pub front.

This pub front I found on google images, the building is located in central London near the Tower of London, its elegant design with nice clean geometry made me think it would be a good contender as something to create that would be both achievable and challenging, that also has a good potential to be built using modular pieces. I also like the idea of making this because the number of materials that are required to be made isn’t too much that a lot of my time would be spent creating materials, as I am aware making materials does take me a while, and with this piece there aren’t a crazy amount. I think this will be the building I will create and will start the block out in Maya next week.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 2 - 3/6/25

I’ve began creating a mood board using PureRef to start to understand what kind of building I would like to create, there are 3 things that I find have the most importance in this assignment, the first being the time. I have until 14th of July to complete this assignment, and unfortunately, I have a holiday booked from the 4th till the 11th of July, so I’ve lost a weeks’ worth of time, so I need to make sure I focus and factor that in when deciding what to create as I have a very limited amount of time.

The 2nd important thing is the quality, of course creating a high-quality piece of work is always an important factor in any artwork piece someone creates that goes without saying, but I understand the importance of quality especially in games as it allows for real immersion for the player, stunning visual can hold great importance.

Lastly, how enjoyable I find creating the project, I’ve found through the time I have been creating 3D Art, I create my best work when I’m 100% invested and enjoying the work I’m making. I find that when I’m enjoying it, I spend more available time on the project, I’m more efficient, and want every single little detail to be right and not cut any corner or rush anything to get it done at the expense of the quality.

[tyronemw]

Tutor Initiated Project - Day 1 - 2/6/25

Today marks the first day of the 6-week assignment, after a nice zoom call with my lecturer and a discussion about the assignment, I have come to the decision I will be creating a modular building for this assignment. I believe that this is the best decision for me as an artist as the other option in creating a high-fidelity asset wouldn’t be as useful for me going forward as I pursue becoming an environment artist, the opportunity to create and showcase modular building would suit my portfolio better and in a more selfish case I would enjoy making this more.

I don’t really have too many initial thoughts going into this in all honest, I do like more modern style buildings and structures, however the more traditional and dated building do look very impressive when done correctly, however only having 6 weeks to complete this assignment does make me worry slightly, so I know I will have to remember to create something that isn’t too intricate and time consuming in order to finish in a timely fashion. Tomorrow I will create a mood board and start thinking about what it is I want to create.

[tyronemw]

Developing Skills - Further Development - Red Vs Blue

Today I just set up some cameras and messed around with the sequencer to get some static and action shots of my scene, really trying to capture the essence of scene and show off all the angles that the scene has to offer. I began with the main hero shot of it down the middle, as well as a few angled to the left and to the right.  I wanted to make sure that I had got the right composition, using the leading lines towards the end of the alleyway looking towards the purple neon light at the back to really display the lights well and showcase the reflections and how every prop has its place in the scene and display its quality.

After messing around with the cameras settings make sure I got the correct focal lengths and composition, I made sure not to do too much with the colour grading as I wanted it the environment to look as real to what the scene actually is as possible, I wanted it to be as genuine as possible so I didn’t really touch those settings, with all this done, I captured the images and everything from now was completed!