Concept
Windmill Bakery
For my model concept, I knew I wanted a mini 3D scene or a diorama type model. As I was drawing the concept, I wanted the windmill to have some sort of story or personality. My first variation of the concept (left) is closer to a standard windmill design, it does have personality but I wasn’t quite sold on it yet. In the second iteration, there are some minor changes, the windmill building itself is more centered, I kept the idea of the waterwheel + pond but moved it to the left, I changed the single lantern post to smaller lanterns on the building itself. To add a bit more story/personality, I imagined the windmill to also act as a bakery so I drew a market stall-ish building attached to the main windmill, with some grain bags and a wheelbarrow underneath. This ended up being my final concept.
Progression
I think its hard to show my development/progression since a lot of my workflow is second nature and I forgot up until this point to document the model’s progress. However, I have been trying to implement some improvements in how I model, I never really used instances before for duplicate geometry. Mike suggested it when I was working on the mountain bike model and it makes it much easier to UV unwrap objects that will share the same UV space. It also saves time having to manually manipulate individual copies as when you edit/change an instance its applies to all of its children.
At this point I’m a bit worried about the diorama’s final polycount, its currently at 58k tris/29k quads, there isn’t a polycount for this assignment but I don’t want it to become excessive. I might be able to bake in some of the roof tiles instead of having them be actual geometry.
The scene outliner also looks a bit crazy at the moment but I’m keeping objects separate so it makes it easy to sculpt them individually later in blender.
Also I’m planning for everything to share one material by the end and I am just using different ones at this stage to break up the grey visuals/confusion while modelling.
Expansion of my PureRef moodboard
