Innovation Week: Low Poly Worlds Workshop with Jay Payne

Low Poly Worlds Workshop

For today's workshop during innovation week, I will be working on Cinema 4d to create a low poly landscape. However, due to the weather conditions and the low attendance of students for the workshop, (only myself and a friend turned up) It has been canceled. Luckily Jay has provided a link to the notes and assets for this workshop I will be working off these notes to see what I can create. 

A screen Cap of the outcome from the workshop day.

Is a bit chilly. -5 to be exact it's a lot more snowy than it seems, just my camera doesn't pick it up.

Below is the screen shot of the assets provided by Jay for this workshop, the assets consist of a couple of trees and a house all in a low poly style. the house/shack has a crooked look to it which I thought looked pretty cool and the trees having foliage similar to number dice was a nice touch to the low poly appeal. 

First I will be creating the house using the notes provided which i will then be editing/adjusting or making my own design so it isn't similar to the house asset provided. To start us off I needed to create a cube with the XYZ Scale co-ordinates set to X-250/Y-200/Z350 and the segments set at X-2/Y-4/Z-4 which was then made editable. 

Next using the point select tool I selected the centre top row and raised it by 50cm giving it a  basic pointed roof shape.

Using the poly select tool I then extruded these new roof polys with an offset of 10cm, now seeing that the notes state to do this with all the roof polys I will be doing this to only one side to create a form of Half roof and then extruding the rear end of the house up to make an asymmetrical roof top. To do this I first used the point select tool and raised one side of the roof by 50cm and then extruded it by a further 10cm to match the roof polys.  

For this house design I was thinking of creating something similar to a market stand, and create buildings off of it and see where to go from there. 

This part was a little confusing what I had to do next with the roof, with it still selected I used the scale tool to scale the roof to approximately 105%, doing so would result in the roof having more of an angle nearer to the top of the roof polys, I next then used the live selection tool to drag the roof downwards by 20cm.  

The roof was then extruded by 20cm again to create a roof lip over the edge of the building it's slightly tricky to see that there is a lip on the screen shot below but hopefully when I add a light source it might be a bit more apparent.

Next to fill the gap between the top of the angled roof and the flat roof I extruded the side flat roof with the poly selection tool active by around 20cm, I also make some extra extrusions to different parts to fill in any gaps or breaks. These can be sorted out later because I have a plan as to how I want the final render to look. 

  

With the gaps filled I decided to expand the building more at the rear, using the poly select tool I selected all rear facing polys and extruded them by 140cm, the reason why I did this because I decided to expand upwards with this building, possibly making something like an above store apartment.  

I wanted to also have another building attached to the side of this one as if the building was in a built up location like a city. To do this, I selected the polys at the side of the building and extruded them by 280cm with to create a square block to work from, At the moment I have a vague idea as to how I want the scene to go but this will no doubt change as I develop this model. 

I started to work on the base structure for the top of the building by extruding the top panels by 200cm looking at the structure so far I think it's coming along quite nicely, I might have to expand the back a little further because the top building might end up a little bit short. 

For my final render I was thinking of having a 2 point perspective camera angle similar to the screenshot below, I wanted to test out camera positions because there might be some places where I can skip on structural details to save time. 

I decided to take a quick break but when I came back I had the idea of turning the side building into a garage with an over hanging extension to the apartment above. Through experimenting with the extrude tool, It resulted with the screenshot bellow, I added a column and a support wall under the over hang to make the building look more realistic. Additionally I added a floor object, raised the building above the grid and changed it's colour from the floor. My ideas for this was to make a compact building that you would see in a built up area of countries like Japan or China so I have been taking inspiration from street views of cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong for referencing. 

With the core part of the building made I started adding details such as windows, starting with the window of the main base of the building, I wanted quite a long window with an outdoor ledge I that I might put some 3d objects onto for finer detail. I also added an area light so I could experiment with positions and density of shadows.  

In the final renders I want to have some different perspectives of the building including a first person perspective so as a test I placed down some temporary cameras as potential camera spots, I liked the angle of the first person camera, although it misses out a good portion of the building at this angle, i like the perspective it gives. 

additionally looking at the camera shot It might be a little too, this I will have to experiment with more. 

With the camera adjusted slightly to a lower angle I next worked on creating a sign for the side of the overhanging part of the building, once I had the basic model I had a play around with the render settings such as adding ambient occlusion and created a glowing material just to see if I could create my own glowing sign, the sign does emit a glow but I think the glow is a bit too dim and the sign itself has a really unrealistic red colour to it so this is something I'll have to look into further down the line. 

Afterwards I created a second cube object and extended it over the bottom of the building, I raised both off of the floor object to create a path way, using the bevel tool selected on all edges set with the offset of 6cm with a subdivision of 1 I was Able to create a curb.

At the time of typing this it's 8pm and I've been in the studio all day working on this. The building design so far went extremely well and I'm very please as to how the building turned out, additionally I'm glad I was Able to experiment and span off of the notes given by Jay.

I'd love to continue this whenever I have the chance to, I have some good ideas that I want to implement. I want to add some additional details to the side of the building make another window or two for the upper parts of the structure, additionally I want to have a go at editing the sign on the side and see if I can make it look a bit more like an advertisement sign. Detail wise i want to have a go at making things like a rain pipe and a grid. 

from the looks of it, it doesn't really look like a days worth of work but there was a lot of experimentation done with this along side learning what the tools did without the help of Jay or my friend who is much better at this software.