Modelling Buer's Potions Emporium

This week started off with a productive boost. I imported the gates for the Cerberus gateway which I had made over the weekend into my level and attached them to the stone gate way I had constructed a couple of months ago. This was a task I was dragging my heels on due to the complexity of the topper piece that sat on top of the gateway symbolise ears and I knew I wanted to employ similar tubing and bars to form my Victorian gate. Looking at gates from the Victorian era I can see that all of them have some degree of complexity with swirls and curls. The iron workers back from that period of history must’ve really loved their craft to discover the pliability of iron and form them into such uniform yet intricate rods that come together to form a gate. My gates I wanted to be similar to the topper in design using a similar range of small and large curls straight and curved rods. My initial design was to create a paw print between the two gates so when they were closed it would appear whole. The original design also incorporated curved iron to form flames around the paw print however when showing the design to a few people it was obvious that the excess flames confused the image of the paw print and it was lost. So the final design dropped the flames and only featured the paw print surrounded by straight rods to focus on the paw print solely.

With this little victory I moved onto making the last major asset of my level which was of course Buers potions Emporium. The problem with this asset is its sandwiched right in the middle of Beezlepub, which has a massive horn sprouting from the side of it, and Alastor’s armour which has a forge that spills out onto the street. These two characterful buildings have left little room for Buer’s to be as big as the other 2 however I wanted this store to be more subtle and seem more mysterious. The purpose of this store if it were going to be a functioning game is to be the health and mana shop. So I wanted to make this shop look a mix between and Victorian pharmacy and sweet shop. It needed to look enticing and exciting. I feel I have done this with the protruding display windows one singular with 3 tiers on the left side of the door and the other larger similar to the bay window put into Alastors Armoury. It is my hope to create some items to go into these windows and create a display but with time pressed against me that is only something I will attempt if I have a week to spare before the deadline and Im happy I have completed my level to the best I can before having it marked.

Buer’s was actually incredibly straight forward and I found I had built and unwrapped it within a day or so. It was then I turned my attention to the perimeter house I had built with selection of windows and doors. This house was designed to be multi use. When rotated one way the building would have a particular look and sillouette and when rotated it would have another distinctive look. The windows and doors mean I can customise the look of the building to make it seem different and fresh when actually it’s the same asset. The only thing I needed to do was finish modelling the opposing side then unwrap the whole thing. This wasn’t particularly challenging but when added to my level it really helped box in the environment with many different views of a building being generated by this asset and its mix and match pieces. It was using this technique that I was able to enclose my environment creating the level I had originally set out to create and so the earlier suggestion of turning it into a diorama was dropped and I persevered to make my level as close to my vision as I possibly could. Happy with the shape of my level and even creating a side street nook I moved onto texturing again starting with the biggest glaring eye sore currently which was the Beelzepubs horn. As I was only able to start it late Friday there is still more I would like to do to it but currently this is my work in progress.

Very happy with this week felt I addressed a lot of nagging things that were killing my confidence with this project. With the project looking more and more like the level idea I proposed I am more motivated to get all of my ideas into the level.