November 2017

In November, my attention was mostly on my job. My students and I went to Disney World during Thanksgiving, and I had a big performance coming up at the beginning of December to prepare. The progress on the UHS project mostly focused on superfical elements, such as textures and UI elements. 

First, a big breakthough was in the brick textures. Initially, I tried creating the bricks individually, but even with minimal Subdivision surface (a smoothing modifier that multiplies the polygons), that resulted in tens of thousands of polygons. Also, it looked bad! I had already tried creating normal maps using the bake normals feature in Blender when I made the tile texture, so I did the same thing for bricks. A good explanation of a normals map is at https://youtu.be/U7PQGgz1RII. 

Below is a comparison of two methods. On the left are bricks represented by a flat texture with a normals map (in theory, only 2 polygons), and on the right is a wall created with individual bricks (1,293,604 polygons). The version with the normals map is much more satisfactory, as it renders more realistically and uses less GPU processing power. I did, however, have to color the bricks individually, but only for a single row of 28 courses. It is only evident from a distance that the pattern repeats. 

The texture (on the right) was created  in Blender by baking a normals map directly from the model of the bricks (on the left, behind the flat plane).

I created a variation of this brick texture for the areas of the building that had white glazed brick, for example, the bathrooms. I used the same normals map, and changed the red color to solid white. I also added an alpha layer to make the mortar non-reflective ("rough") while keeping the brick faces smooth. 

 I was not satisfied with my earlier version of the stair walls, so I recreated those, and added railings. 

I had previously been adding color to the hallways by adding a flat plane over the wall. This ends up with an additional draw call, so it is not ideal. Since I needed the color to be on the rounded portions of the stairs anyway (and adding a plane would defeat the work I did modeling the round stair walls), I experimented with using a decal to add the color. A decal is essentially a texture projected onto a surface. This proved to be much simpler. 

I have no photographic evidence of the actual color in the hallways. The only photos I have are in black and white, so I used a combination of a 1917 Montgomery Ward paint swatch (from antiquehome.org), and artistic license/guesswork.

Many of the rooms in the reference photos included floor rugs. I found images of rugs online, and created several variations. 

The final addition in November was the modeling of the brick sill in the stair portals.