The police station in Student Accomplice was the backdrop for the final scenes of our short, so we took special care to get it right.
After seeing some exploration sketches, I did a few quick concept models since our 2D team was swamped.
After these explorations, Brandon Beltran and Alessandro Flynn did a more specific designs to match the feel of our city, which led to another 3D pass. Since so many shots take place in this area, we made sure to looks at many different camera angles to ensure we truly liked the design before we moved forward.
I thought I was okay at scale and proportion for buildings, but this pass reminded me to be more careful! Seeing the cars and characters next to the stairs and doors was honestly a bit embarrassing - but I definitely learned my lesson about modeling without scale reference in the scene and following a simple sketch too exactly :)
This is when we landed on our final design! Brandon also gave me this excellent depth pass to define the column structure which I think really improved the realism of the design.
From here modeling wise it was just about iteration and refinement! I'll let you click through the gallery to see the process. I also transitioned my model from Maya to Houdini at this point so I could have procedural control of the brick layout and beveling as well as better instance control for the windows and bricks.
Adding "wonk" (which is what we began to call our style) was the final step for modeling. The first version we didn't end up liking, so I got more draw-overs for the final version.
Here is the wonked model with some base colors for better visualization. This is also when I added wonk to the brick patterns as well for subtle variety.
And here is the final modeling pass. We published our USD assets through a custom version of Houdini's component builder which could preserve the layered instancing that this asset needed to keep the scenes fast.
Since this was one of the last things I ended up shading for Accomplice, (and to be honest with you all, since we were running out of time) we didn't have nearly as many shading iterations, and I was poorer at documenting the process.
Much of the shading feedback at this point wasn't happening in dailies, it was "hey come over and look at this," so I don't have specific iteration breaks. Here is our material breakdown and the reference sheet I created for the building however.
Here is the final asset!
And here it is in shot. Since the door was animated in some shots, when rigging took it they accidentally deleted my shading UC set which we did not discover until animation was finished! That meant I had to re-shade the door and match a totally different UV set/ texel density than I originally planned for. It is not a perfect match, but I'm happy with how it turned out.
Thanks for reading! As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
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