kitchen development

The kitchen was quite easy to develop due to the reference material I had to go on.

I initially started by going on-line to estate agents to see some generic apartment kitchens in Leeds to get an over all feel of the the average kitchen:

Very rarely there was wooden cabinets, although they looked modern the most popular cupboards were white:

I also noticed a lot of open plan kitchens which influenced my design as I took real evidence to what apartments in Leeds look like on average with open plan kitchens.

Another thing that I noticed were the windows, I initially designed square windows which, in retrospect, looked very old fashioned where as floor to ceiling windows such as the image above suggests looks a lot more in tune with the architecture in Leeds.

After gathering general photos of Leeds apartments I then photographed my own kitchen and the various assets in which reside in my kitchen, this was due to the size of my kitchen. It is quite small which replicates the design in which I was going for.

As well as reference photos I gathered some texture shots to start doing some texture test. For example I took a photo of my oven to put in the UV map of the counter in my virtual model and here is the result.

This worked out quite well considering it was a first test. This was very beneficial as I learnt how important it was to create UV maps that make the most of textures and the way you model your assets to get the quickest renders instead of having hundreds of materials that have to be calculated which is what I used to do. This also caused the decision to do a separate full test in which I create UV maps as well as normal maps and specular maps to get the most detail with as little performance loss as possible.

I started a bit late, but I started to use a screen capturing software to capture my workings in Maya to better describe how I went around creating certain assets, here is a sped up capture of a small portion of modelling the kitchen.

Added fridge.

Using layers was a fantastic way to create an efficient work flow where I could see an object from every angle without having to move them destructively. My workflow is slowly getting much quicker and efficient through these tests and modelling sessions which will be very beneficial when it comes to crunch time and I'm still not figuring out how to model a certain way.

Here is a render with all of the assets layers turned onto visible to show the addition of the sink, and hob detail, minus the ceiling. and here is another render of everything (including the ceiling) open to show off the pivot points that I have chosen to reveal the detail in which I have put into the work.

As you can see there is a lot of speckling in the render and I had to render the frame a few times as the point light I added to light up the scene to see the detail wasn't intense enough, it had a value of 3000 and was coming out like this:

This is because I am modelling to scale so the type of decay I am using (quadratic) needs to be very intense in order to cast the right lighting. This made me realise I needed to do another test in the near future on lighting when using to scale models. also to clean up the speckling effect that is being created.

I am very happy with the progress so far and it has taught me some valuable workflow lessons that will not only increase my speed but also my efficiency when modelling.