The Making of “New Homes”

I’ve been working hard over the past year to sharpen my 3D modelling skills. It’s long been a hobby of mine, but only recently have I been taking it more seriously with an eye toward improving.

This project has had a long life. I think, maybe, I never quite executed it the way I imagined – but in my opinion, one of the most important aspects of pushing yourself is to finish projects. In that spirit, I’ve finally driven this one to completion. Here’s the concept, sketched in 2010:

I knew I wanted to do create his scene in 3D, but it never really took off. Later that year I took a crack at it and started roughing things out. It was good to mess around and teach myself some tricks, but other than that… nothing special. I mean everything kind of looks like this when you’re just starting on an idea, but you can kinda see I didn’t really have a plan.

After some intervening projects, I picked it up again. I knew if I could put these individual ideas in context I might feel more motivated. I find that I get a little boost of enthusiasm if I can see things coming together. The new trick I picked up this time was getting the clouds inside the space station dome to look convincing. I got this far before losing interest:

Around this time, I became very interested in the video game art pipeline and started learning some standard practices. One of these is building a high-poly model, then “baking” normals and lighting maps, which are applied to a lightweight low-poly version of the same model. I returned to this concept after some practice, excited to apply this new knowledge. I have a lot to learn still, especially with regards to painting the models:

After I was happy with these models, I rendered everything in position and then put the final touches on everything in Photoshop. Looking back, I think the project was more ambitious than I thought, which might explain my waxing and ebbing interest in it. Each of the three models took a lot of time and attention, and I had to make some compromises to control the scope and keep things moving. All-in-all, though, I’m pretty happy with how that sketch from two years ago was realized: