When modelling the lobby..

Having experienced a hard-working while interesting process, we eventually finished our project to model the lobby. Here, we share our experience and welcome you to ask questions and give suggestions:)

First, we will show some screenshots of our final model compared to the picture of the real lobby.
















To finish this, we achieved three steps: doing the shape modelling, adding textures and using in the Unity game engine.

1. 3D modeling

Before modeling, we took measurement of the length for every part. For those which can’t be measured directly, we took pictures and then calculated the length according to the scale.

1.1 Modelling the main structure of the lobby

1.1.1 Basement

We first draw the blueprint of this floor with AutoCAD 2015. Here is the image.

Then, we imported the image into Maya and created a reference layer as the modeling basement. According to the tutorial, Modeling Tutorial using modeling toolkit maya Modeling from blueprints [1], on Youtube, we created a polygon plane on the grid. And then we used Multi-Cut Tool to make the plane fit for the blueprint.

When we finished these steps, we selected certain faces and used Extrude Tool to make them into the wall. The result is shown as follows.

This is the basic structure of the lobby.

1.1.2 Arched doors

There are a lot of ways to build arch. We use “Multi-Cut Tool” to draw the basic shape of the arch based on our real pictures. Then “extrude” the face. We adjust the positions of some points to make the whole shape more suitable.

Adding the arches to the basic structure shown above and the lobby looks like this.

1.2 External stairs

We have tried with two ways. One way is to build a stair and then duplicate with “Duplicate Special”. It looks like this.

Then embed another shape. Here it the final result for stairs.

Another way is to draw one face shape with the tool “Create Polygon Tool” and then extrude the face. It should be like this.

The stairs are built as a whole. It looks better but difficult to adjust when putting this into our project. We chose the first way.

1.3 Decorations

1.3.1 Table and chairs group

When creating the chairs, we referred to this tutorial [2], which explicitly shows how to use Polygon Cube to create a sofa. The most important part for the chair was to use Bevel Tool to create beveling for the chair, shown below.

Creating the table is relatively simple, but there are some details being paid attention to. For example, the height of the table should fit for those of  the chairs as they are a group. Also, as the following image suggested, under the desktop, there are four small polygons.

The next object is the table lamp. We first created some Polygon Cylinders to make the lamp base. As for the cover, we created a Polygon Sphere and used Multi-Cut Tool to cut it into a semi-sphere, shown as follows.

    

1.3.2 Pendant Lamps

The pendant lamp composed of two parts- the upper decoration and the bottom light box. The bottom light box is made of Polygon Cylinder but you have to modify the Subdivisions Axis value into 6 to make it wit a hexagon bottom. You also need to prepare for the texture part by cutting the surface.

The upper decoration is more complicated. You can create one part and then duplicate into 6 parts. The method to create them is the same as the armrest, which can be read in the following part.

1.3.3 Armrest

This was built with 3 parts. We drew a cylinder with several Height division. Then we adjusted the points at each division layer to make it look like this. We added a sphere at the end of arched side.

For the rest part, we used the same method to adjust a cube to make it look like this.

1.3.4 Railings

There are two groups of railings. Here we would like to choose one as an example to introduce how to model them. What we thought difficult is the decoration on the railing. We first created a pipe and delete part of it. Then we moved some points. In this way, we could finish a quarter of the shape. At last, rotate the part of the pipe and adjust with “Move Tool” and “Scale Tool”. You can see from the final result.

2. Add texture

The next step is to apply textures to the 3D models. Here we will introduce how to apply the real pictures as the materials, for example, for the windows, doors and the pendant lamps. Here is the result after adding the picture materials.

   

Steps: Process your pictures at first, then “Assign New Material”, and name your new material in order to find it easily. Choose the face you want to apply the material to. Project the texture and adjust the scale to get a better result.

We took the pictures of the ground, wall, armrest, chairs, table, table lamp, etc and processed them in Photoshop as textures. The textures can be seen below.

Add the texture for objects and the lobby model has finally finished.

The next post will be the part to export into Unity as well as our final video and real-time modelling demo:)

P.S. The two tutorials are from the Youtube:

[1] Maya 2015 Modeling Tutorial using modeling toolkit maya Modeling from blueprints [EB/OL]．https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFBmg-N41gs ．

[2] Maya Modeling Tutorial- modeling a living room part- 1 [EB/OL]．https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRhJWqwnmuM ．