Populating the window area - 1st Feb

It's been a very productive couple of days so far with plenty of stuff with updates. Firstly is the feedback from Darren on Friday:
- Get a camera spline in the environment and do a test
- Start adding small details to the wood floors and supports
- Populate the walls is the main priority as it looks far too bare
- Use tricks like 2D planes for my curtainsI decided to act upon the walls point first.
I started blocking out the paintings on the walls and ended up with this result:

I've ended up with about 13 paintings in total, this is a serious amount and so I needed to optimize these, mainly for my own benefit and piece of mind. All the paintings in the scene use the same 1024x1024 texture map. They all use 2 types of frames, one light and one dark, to achieve this I overlapped UV shells on top of each other, not only does this save texturing time but allows for the maximum amount of resolution for the paintings themselves.

However this is the major problem here, I don't own any of these paintings, I took initial pro-cautions such as using the very back end of Google images to find them but I'm unsure if i'll be able to use these in the final product. It could be a case of signing a delectation form or trying to contact the owners.

From my point of view I'm not making any money off this and I need historically accurate paintings to complete the look, we'll see how it goes.

I've also worked on the bookshelf and book assets. Super easy assets to create. For the bookshelf I used one of my pre-made materials and made it slightly lighter and added a little more gloss, nothing crazy but I really like the subtle details.

The books are all the same mesh, taken into Mudbox to add in the ridges on the spine (like most 18th century books) and then I created a multitude of different textures inside dDo. These include different colours and some having gold lettering.

I might go back into this and make one or two more that have dust on the top surface, it seems a little over-the-top but I feel it will add to the story that maybe this place hasn't been visited in a long time.

I was going to stop there but then I figured I had another hour left in the day so I created the little light that hangs above the map table. Again a really simple asset which I could re-use another custom material (same as the candle holder with less bumps and more scratches)

I also re-used the glass material here and made it darker with some more dirt for where the candle inside would dis-colour the glass itself.

A closer look at this area, I kind of want to add a little more to the outside area like a proper sky and some sea but we'll get there soon enough.

It's starting to look quite nice in this area now, it's certainly one place I've tried to draw the players eye to but I just want to add some more props here and there and bar some polish this area will be finished for now.

I've made a couple other developments as well but don't really deserve their own images these include:
- Upping the normal map on the stage wood paneling
- Adding an alpha to the map and some burnt edges (Candle wax would have dripped onto it from time to time)
- Fixed some corrupted FBXs which resulted in some horrible beams and picture frames
- Adjusted the placement of some trees