I’ve often been inspired by courses such as the following preview on Gnomon
but the detailed modelling has always put me off. I’ve decided to bite the bullet by starting with something simple, reproducing in 3D the above photo I took a few years ago. After that move on to something more complex.
I used fspy to set up the initial scene and UV Project to texture the geo with the initial photo. As I create elements I’ll paint them out in the texture. You can see upper left where I’ve started to paint out the spouting now that I have a model in place. Just a rough start.
I managed to make a decent bump map for the wall (in Krita, but still needs cleaning up) by using a couple of Threshold filters, one for the bottom half (inverted) and the other for the top half, given that the mortar at the bottom is lighter than the bricks and at the top it’s darker.
Sometimes those kind of building assets look a bit weird because there are pipes and wire and even windows… well where they don’t belong… you did the hardest thing by choosing a reference which seems to be heavily changed over ther years… even parts of the boardwalk seems to lead into an older entrance…
But keep on challengeing…
Most of the ‘Back Alley’ images I’ve seen appear to have a lot of changes over the years. I was looking for an image that didn’t have too much ‘stuff’ going on so that it was at least achievable with my current level of patience. I haven’t used curves/paths a lot in the past but that’s changing…
A bit more modelling to do, a bit more painting out on the diffuse, and bump needs attention, but I’ve already got a lot out of this little study And textures on all the pipes, cables and ducts of course.
Cleaning up the bump map. Done enough for today. It’s a bit tedious but I’d rather use the photo than a procedural brick texture. Just looks more real.
Tried a different approach to fixing problems - touching up the render rather than fixing the bump map. I think I’ve got what I wanted out of this exercise, and probably won’t work on it further unless I actually use it in some image.
And textures on all the pipes, cables and ducts of course.
