Geolocation Project Update

 Okay, so a lot has happened between this post and the last one.

I began modelling the police box in Maya based on the schematic from TardisBuilders.com (by user starcross):



I created separate models for the roof and the corner posts, and assembled them together in a separate file:

Normal post (center of police box)

Corner post (with slightly indented section)

Roof of the police box

Final police box model

I then exported it as an fbx file to be imported into 3DS Max, where I could texture it. The only problem was, I didn't have a decent set of pictures of the same police box to use for the UV Map of the model. I was planning to go out and photograph a police box, but the one on Google Maps on Leith Walk (at least, I think that's what the road was called) was in the process of being converted into a mini-restaurant. 

Needless to say, that plan was a no-go (unless I can find another police box with its original paint job intact), so I decided to use the blueprint as a base to create my own texture.

I created the file manually using GIMP (to get only the lines from the original blueprint image so I could add colour layers underneath) and Autodesk Sketchbook (to make the actual image). I then projected the various views onto the box in 3DS Max, leading to this:


To be honest, I'm not quite happy with the current look of it, but it's good enough if I don't get the opportunity to get reference images of the actual thing.

Unfortunately, the process of exporting the model into Google Earth wasn't as smooth as I was hoping it would be. Some parts of the model in 3DS Max don't have explicit UV coordinates due to the method I used. This does not cause a problem in 3DS Max, but the moment I export the thing to SketchUp to geolocate it, this hilarious texture glitch happens:


If you have no idea what's happening here, the gist of it is that since these bits don't actually map to anything on the UV map, the program just textures them by tiling the base texture image. This is what the same part looks like in 3DS Max:


So that's something I'm going to have to manually fix.

I tested the geolocation by plonking it smack in the middle of Arthur's Seat (I still haven't picked an actual location yet), and it works!

The Doctor's botched the materialisation again...

So yeah, that's all I have to say for now. Um... bye?

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