Weel 6/7

I had my Alpha scheduled for week 8 so I thought I should probably get the stairs finished and then start assembling more assets in Unreal, creating textures and having the lighting sorted. Needless to say I'm a bit behind schedule.

I imported the ceiling and upstairs bannisters in to the stairs Maya file so I could make sure it would bit in the right place. Using my Pinterest board, I counted how many steps there were of the bottom half. It took me a while to get this right as when you look at the stairs head on, it's misleading as you can't really tell where the curved part of the stairs begins. Eventually I managed to count 9 for the straight part before curving. I was incredibly awkward trying to shape the highlighted section of the stairs in the left image.





The bottom half of the steps curve outward and then they gradually curve inwards. I couldn't quite get the strange arch type shape the curved bit was.

In the end after adding edge loops to a cube and moving around the edges. It ended up with some pretty nasty topology as well. I decided to keep going and then come back to this part if I had time.






From the division plan I had made, I made one side of the circular part of the stairs before mirroring it over. This section was equally as annoying to make as it had to fit with the lower part's curve flow. So I again added loop edges to a cube and extruded the stairs up and around so it was all one piece. Again I made sure to count the number of steps so it would be as accurate as possible. Due to the number of stairs though it was a bit awkward trying to get the curve right as well as the rough step width/depth.

The final set of steps didn't get any easier. I used the scale model to make sure the steps weren't too tall but modelling against this, the number of steps and where the start of the first floor began, it was awkward. Especially because of the shape it wasn't a walk in the park.

Looking back at this, I think it could have been done better using curves, that way I could have gotten the nice flow of the steps easier and they might have been less 'blocky'.

 Using a top down photo of the stairs, I created a curve that followed the shape to create the skirting that went alongside the stairs. Then once in place, I moved the stair verts to align with the skirting. I think this helped improve the flow of the stairs slightly and it didn't look as 'blocky' and it started to resemble the reference images (From top down anyway).

I had to next duplicate the skirting up to act as the bannister and align it with the bannister around the balcony railings on the first floor so I knew roughly the height.











Again I took a little break from the stairs to get the end walls done. On the right is how the upstairs and downstairs looks. Seeing as they're similar, I decided to be modular and just model one version.

To save myself from having to model stuff for the outside, I thought it would look quite nice to have frosted glass. I had a go at using some diferent photoshop brushes to create a 'icy' looking white glass that I could use as an alpha for the windows. Annoyingly, there seemed to be a problem with Unreal dealing with transparency so the end result looked pretty awful.

I chose to keep this in for alpha so I could explain what I wanted to do with it and just show where it was currently at. I also added a base wooden texture for alpha.









Cg texture ref - http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=19797&PHPSESSID=ud42de4lp1jq2sn38lr6s3rdm6