Modeling Skills
I'm Morgan one of the 3D modelers and for this project. I specialize in modeling simple buildings and inside objects. For this post, I am going to share with you some of the modeling techniques that have been most helpful to me.
When I first began modeling the abandoned buildings of the Scotland Correctional Facility, the biggest issue I had was figuring out how to make the windows. I tried to only use one box adding edges to create a grid along the face of the wall that has windows to create a row of texturable squares. As a result, textures added to the surfaces that didn't have windows became distorted:
What I do now is subtract small boxes from the walls, and I found that this action would create a strange diagonal edge on the walls' faces (and greatly increase the poly-count), but there was no distortion:
The windows are more detailed because they intrude into the walls, but they are not as easy to manipulate and measure as the flat ones were without undoing many steps.
When I had to create a roof, I would often use the "Connect" tool, adding a line that splits the top face of a box then raising that line to form a triangular prism atop the building. This, however, stretches out the faces atop the building causing, once again, textures to become distorted:
Instead I create a box that, if sliced diagonally, would have a hypotenuse with the length and width of the box that needs a roof (using the pythagorean theorem). This way, I haven't distorted the other two faces that will have a visible roof shingles texture.
It may take a while to compute the exact X,Y, Z values, but once the roof is atop the building perfectly my building looks pretty great:
These are just a few examples of obstacles I have had to get around while texturing in 3ds Max. It has been tough (and more time-consuming) to have to resort to a lot of lining several objects up to unite them in the Proboolean command, instead of being able to manipulate a single object with just edge creations and extrusions, but I have gotten the hang of it. I've gone back to the basics rather than learning new skills.
I believe my biggest challenge is going to be creating a texturable soundboard without making a spline to extrude from because of its unique, slanted shape that I haven't found is mimicked by any of the creatable prisms in 3ds Max. Regardless of ease, I'll get it done somehow.
