Cathedral That Land Me The BIG O!

I got an exciting phone call earlier today. It’s now currently 12.18 AM and I’m writing this while it’s still raw, don’t know who else I should bother with all these excitement and I just can not hold it in. I’m excited!

So they liked my work, and I get a contract to learn with them! How exciting is that! Aaaahhh!

I have never realized this but I kinda knew I have always been interested in environment art throughout my time at UNSW. On the second term of 2019, for a minor project, I need to design an internal space to explore attitudes towards PBR modular workflows for realtime and offline rendering. So to show how PBR textures work and how to create a modular workflow, I decided to go with a Gothic Cathedral.

I thought to myself that I wanted to push myself to see if I could create a large interior environment. Basing my ideas upon the fact that I love architecture, this lead me to chose a cathedral design. So a back story, if there is one thing I love to visit when landing in a new destination, it’s a cathedral. I still remember vividly when I was a kid, walking into the Notre-Dame de Paris and fell in love with everything in it. European countries give good church whether it’s domed, turreted, with tower or just all the way gothic.

There is something about cathedral that I like. They have the vision to give and act on behalf of the poor, the hungry, the distressed, and the oppressed. It is not either or. The same vision inspires both I feel like. That’s what cathedral is for me. Designed and built by people inspired by a vision of reality in which life is about much more than at first meets the eye. A vision of reality of the world that is shot with meaning and purpose.

Ok, ugh I hated it when I do that. Alright, so that was inspiring.

Back again.

I would say my biggest achievement on that project would be creating an asset by using the technique of photogrammetry, where you take hundreds of photos of an object in real life - I used a baptismal font in St. Andrew’s Cathedral - and transfer these images into a software that calculates where you to the photo to create a 3D model. Shout out to Mr. Aiden who have presented me with many opportunities to expand my skill-set whilst working on this project, including learning how to use Unreal to a higher standard. Crazy!

Back to present day, my work still is lacking on a few things, especially on the texturing stage.

The walls, floor, pews and chandelier have all been textured using Substance Painter. I think I will have to use trim sheets to create textures for all of the other modular assets, which guys, yes it will include arches, columns and windows. Trim sheets are basically a multiple textures laid out side by side inside one bitmap which can be tiled horizontally and vertically. Hopefully by using a single trim sheet I get to use this one sheet to texture multiple assets. 

The main texturing that still needs to take place is the stained glass windows, which will be textured in a different way through render to texture. And that lead to the biggest challenge that is…. figuring out how to create realistic stained glass. Apparently that one was not realisitc enough, and I agree. Was thinking that the stained glass should be created by hand using Photoshop first before I import it into a point light in Unreal.

In all honesty I do not know how am I going to do that, just hoping that by using the render to texture technique, I’ll reach the look that we are all hoping for. Unlikely. But I am going to try.

Ok that is all.

I’m done now!