UPDATE: The project is now finished, go check out the result here.
(beginning of the original post)
Hello everyone. I have started a project in the 1st of July, to recreate Patission street, a very central and long road in Athens that has some very important buildings. My actual goal was not to recreate it accurately as a road, but to model and texture accurately some key buildings as well as enough of the classical buildings from the 60’s-80’s, and some road props of course, and then place them in the way I want so that they would be still recognisable. At the moment I have modelled, shaded and textured almost all of the road assets, and about 6 buildings, and now I model more of them in order to have variation, and the roads and pavements. For now I am posting a full shaded render of the National Archaeological Museum:
The model of the Museum is 114.928 vertices, rendered in cycles with 150 samples for 2 and a half minutes with the CPU on a Toshiba Satellite L655 (that I use Blender with), with a Intel Core i5 CPU, 2 Cores and 4 GBs of RAM. The textures are from cgtextures.com (in other models I used mostly procedural textures).
And a wireframe of it (keep in mind that since I used the wireframe node, it is not accurate as it is triangulated):
Since I wanted to model and shade everything accurately, I went out and took myself 364 photos of a portion of the road for reference, so I am posting one of the Museum for comparison.
I am using Blender for about 2 years and this is my third big project using it and the first I share on the Internet.
So that is from me for now, I will be posting briefly renders of other models as well as my progress. It would be very helpful if you leaved some feedback or comments on what I should improve in the pictures i post.
Here is one of the typical buildings from the 60s (which are found a lot in this street) i have modelled and shaded (the texturing was only with procedural textures):
After modelling a couple of these buildings I found that the key to scenes with repeatable models is to not repeat them automatically, for example with an array modifier or a particle system, but to duplicate and randomize yourself while making each same object somehow unique, either the model itself or the materials/textures or if it’s an animation then the keyframes. In this building I modelled one floor, then I added an array modifier but I separated the windows, the air-conditioners, the satellite dishes, the appartment separators and the tents so that I could make them different in each appartment and floor, and then when I will duplicate it across the street I will randomize them again and again so that each building is unique.
As for the grounfloor, I am modelling some shops that will go there.
Any questions, comments or feedback are always welcome.
Thank you, too!!! I will try to post interesting things…
The feedback is that keeps me motivated, so don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts and questions here, I will be happy to answer!
Anyway, back to my progress, right now I am modelling some more of the typical buildings you find frequently in Patission, but they are not done, so here are a bus stop and a telephone booth that I have modelled among other things:
I started working a little bit more efficiently because I want to finish this project somehow fast without having bad quality work as the final result, I think I have found the balance between time and quality in this one I believe, which is to keep everything a little more than mid-poly in order to have some details and not just cubes, but also I have made a list with my TODOs to be organised. This way I know what to do without wasting too much time. In my opinion the key to creating anything of any type, and I don’t talk only about art, is to be able to find a balance between time and quality, which is very different in every situation.
One other thing is that I have not posted anything close to the final composition of the scene, such as renders with the exact camera angles or lighting, since my actual goal wasn’t only to recreate Patission street, so I will keep the element of surprise until the final result.
Anyway, as I said, any feedback is the most important factor that keeps me motivated.
-Jonathan
Just finished modelling another typical building (I have made too much of these), and since it is near to a cinema I decided to put it next to it for this demonstration cause I had already modelled it:
The cinema is much simpler than other models I’ve made, but I don’t think it needs more detail, I just saw that all of the existing models I have are at a total of 381.789 until now, without counting the fact that buildings and props are duplicated lots of times. So… whatever I can do to reduce render times and needless work that won’t be seen because of the distance from the camera, is important.
-Jonathan
So here are generally the overall remaining tasks: model and shade a couple more typical buildings, maybe one more different than these, finalize the arrengement of the street buildings and props, maybe model a couple more props, finalizing the actual road and pavements, lighting, rendering (this one will take most of the time propably), compositing, rendering the composite, the end?
So I think I am reaching the end of this project, we will see, this is exiting cause before the 1st of July, when I started this project, I hadn’t touched Blender for 3-4 months…
-Jonathan
This simple scene is 10.230 vertices (everytime I check the vertex count there are numbers in order, don’t know why!).
So right now I am arranging roads, buildings, and props. This is very fun, especially after almost finishing most of the hard work…
-Jonathan
Very well done. Keep it this way. Some courage is needed of course.
However…
We have to wait for volumetrics in cycles. You gonna need it. And lot of small figures, like riot policemen.
I can’t remember how much tear gas I had in my life, in this particular Patision st.
lol.
We can still meet in this archeological athens museum. Still my favorite. I spent some of my life there. (I was a student of ASKT (fineArtsSchool) once upon a time.). So, you have to model polytechnio building too.
Cheers.
Ευχαριστώ για την υποστήριξη, michalis!
Ίσως για μια πιο επίκαιρη αναπαράσταση… As I’ve told in a previous post, this project is not only about recreating Patission, but if you want we will discuss about this after I post the final result…
Abouth the Πολυτεχνείο (the polytechnical university of Athens, where important historical events happened), I have in my photographic reference collection of Patission hundreds of photos of it, and I really wanted to model it… Now because of time I postponed it temporarily, so I am first finishing with all of the other things and if I have time I will do my best to model it as well… You’re right, I can’t just skip such an important historical building…
-Jonathan
Well, I have reference photos from almost all the statues of the athens museum, multiple angle views.
Just in case you gonna model the interior.
lol.
The truth is, I could get involved on such a project. Endless project indeed.
Amazing work. I need to start modeling things like that for my project. Been having some computer problems, but I got it fixed now. I think I had enough time slacking off. Once again, amazing work.
The material is using only procedural textures (like every other material in this project except posters, the telecommunications building, the museum and some road signs).
