This week I was able to finish my new Penn Hall model. This new model is much more accurate to the real Penn hall. The roof us more accurate that before, the dimensions of the building scale to the actual building. The step count is very close to the actual amount of steps (16). There are no problems with the windows like there were before. The polygon count is significantly lower, and there are no overlapping vertices. This time I was able to make the entire mesh out of a few shapes which made it much easier to apply textures. This time I kept the mesh in mirror mode which meant if I ever needed to make a change or improvement, I would only have to do it to one quarter of the building and it would automatically be applied to the rest of the building.
After the model was finished, I had to add textures to make Penn hall more realistic. I found a good online texture for the bricks that matched up perfectly to their original. For the windows I filled them in with a dark blue material. The hardest part was the roof. There were no textures online that matched the roof, but I had an Idea. Alyssa and I went out to Penn Hall with the drone to take pictures of the roof, I used those pictures to texture wrap the roof, while there isn’t a normal map for it, the roof still looks much better and realistic.
The next step was to build the environment around Penn Hall. The most difficult thing was the sidewalks. I didn’t think of an efficient way to do it so I made them in Blender by hand. The process was very tedious but I think I made them look decent for now. I will have to go back to them later to make sure they look good enough for the final presentation. I started putting in the trees near Penn Hall as well as the grass. The scene is starting to come together. Going into next week, I will try to get as far as I can in touching up the scene. Afterwards, I will add in the VR Interactions. I do not think this step will be that difficult because I already spent a lot of time with it and there are a lot of base scripts given to you through Unity assets.
