Project self reflection

I am overall pleased with the outcome of this project, I managed to meet not only the project brief but also the original vision that I had set out to achieve right at the beginning of this project. I went for a more realistic looking model which meant beams and overall shape was not overall exaggerated and I was trying to keep in mind the structural integrity of the building, this meant placing beams were support would be needed and making sure any kind of warping i did to the basic shape didn't  look like it was about to collapse.

One thing i think went well in this project was the shape of the building itself, it started off being quite square and this made it look dull but through series of evolution's which I outline in my blog “the journey of the house’ I took it from that dull little block to a more fleshed out and interesting looking building. The main reason I made such changes was because I wanted that slightly wonky and looming feeling of the architecture I had done my research on as seen in the blog post’   ‘   .  I tried to not over do it so it didn't look cartoonish as I was going for that more realistic look but I did exaggerate the bowing of the side structure as it gave the building a bit more character.

One thing I could have improved was the detailing on the roof, I think if I had loop cut and edited the steps of the roof structure to match the dips in between the tiles it would have turned out looking a lot nicer than it did. The roof was my least favourite part of the entire model as although I liked its overall shape, its structure looked a bit too messy for my liking. If I were to redo the roof I'd have set out individual plank shapes for the layers of tiles, aligned the uv’s more, pieced it together than then merged it as it would have been quicker and may have produced better results with half the hassle.

Another positive of this piece, and the main one overall, is the work I did in the unreal engine to set it in a scene. I am very new to unreal so when I was putting it all together it was a lot of tinkering to get things right. I managed to figure out how to make a texture look more three dimensional using normal maps and how to make things glow using emissive maps. Since I had limited textures to work from I figured out how to adjust the colour and saturation of a texture so I could make the flooring look a bit different from the stone wall even though its from the same texture. Below are some screenshots from the material editor of materials that I tinkered with myself including a firefly material that flickered that I used to make my own particles as I wanted some smaller floating details of some sort but I wasn't using starter content so I made my own.

I think I could have added more edge highlighting to the wooden beams on my trim sheets as they do look a bit under developed and that little bit of extra detailing may have helped them look more interesting . I was quite happy with the decorative beam however as it had more personality in it with the little creatures carved into the wood and if it weren't for the fact it would have made the model look terribly noisy and over detailed I would have used this for every beam.

The two main things I learnt in the time I was doing this project is firstly how to use a trim sheet resourcefully through the re purposing of one section for a few different items , such as the metal sample that I put on my main trim sheet which I used for not only the smoke stack but also the bars of the lower shop window which saved me making a whole new trim just for a black line. The second thing is the ground I now have in unreal as through the trial and error I went through in this project I learnt the basics and also how to fix things that have gone wrong along the way. I now know how to make my own particles and even started to look into the c++ side of things even though I never ended up using it in this particular project.