This past week, I received an order for a custom piece. The customer wanted a wall hanging with a carved relief representation of the Salt Lake City LDS Temple, so I went googling for a 3D model of it. Found some low-poly stuff, nothing suitable, so I ended up building a model from scratch. It'll be nice to have the model on hand, since this area is very much an LDS area and lots of folks around here might want something like this.
It was interesting doing the model, as it was very much like doing a piece of isometric game art. Here is a render of the model:
Looking at the render, you can see that for all the seeming complexity of the structure, it's actually built of a number of smaller repeating pieces, exactly the way I would build my set pieces for isometric games. In fact, here are the basic pieces I constructed the temple from:
Of course, even these pieces are themselves built of smaller repeatable pieces. This is the key, I've found, to building "construction sets" for the creation of isometric architectural and environmental art. Build repeating pieces that you can slot together to create more elaborate structures. For example, the pieces above can be used to create a curtain wall for some kind of castle:
With the proper render settings (directional light only, orthographic camera, etc...) you can take a render like that, crop it, and use it as a wall tile to build a wall as long as you you need.
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Goblinson Crusoe is still in progress. Following the last post, I allowed myself to be talked out of switching to 3D characters. I have the code, but I am afraid of being derailed by the switch. Progress has definitely slowed, though, as we're still doing long days at work. We've got a trade show in 2 weeks that we're trying to get enough pieces together for; after that, I think, things should slow down a little bit.
