Pathway with trees

Ok so what do you guys think about this? On the plus side, the uniformed trees lead the eye into the mansion making for very nice photography. On the other hand, there is no boulivard in the world with trees that all look identical.

The path and ground is all one mesh, but I checked the uv map and its very obvious where the path is. Won't cause any texturing grief. I will prob use the soft modification tool on the grassy bit as well, make it look more natural.

Rounder edges

From the last render I decided I needed to make the edges more obviously rounded to fit the style guide a bit more. I also deleted the wall with the door from the porch model as it obviously stands out on the model. Instead I will create the door seperately. Here it is. I think it looks better.

Roof tiles

Heres the mansion exterior with the roof tiling. Had to do this the long way as I couldn't get the duplicate special to work well enough. The roofs on the side sections for example are sloped in an unusual way, requiring manual tweaking. I did have to adjust the roof shape slightly to get it to work. Duplicating entire lines of tiles however still sped the process up.

Dan, I know you reccomended texturing the tile first, but I grouped all the tiles together, so I can still apply one texture to all of them at once.

Re-re-modelling the mansion

After getting to grips with this simpler technique for modelling smoothly, I decided it was in everyones best interest for me to re-do the mansion. On previous models I had taken an organic approach to modelling as I have previously only modelled characters. This approach led to the model looking rough, and gave unpredictable results when smoothing the mesh. The new approach is very systemactic, and is far more controlled.

Already this mansion is looking much more pleasing to the eye than the last attempt.

making the porch smoother

Heres the smoothed off version of the porch, using dans pillars. I was introduced to a technique the guys figured out that uses edge loops to define the corners before smoothing. This means we can keep the origonal mesh as simple as possible and still end up with nice rounded corners.

Mansion remake

I re-modelled the mansion as the last one was modelled in cm. Also the previous one being made from subdivisions had a very difficult mesh to work any windows into. Let me know what you think of the shape. I saved it before deformation so it will be easy to go back and change it.

I havnt yet built the roof in case I do end up changing the main building shape, and I havn't built the porch as I'm going to use the one I already modelled.

Dan, if I could grab the pillar you made, I'll replace the pillars I made on the porch with them as yours is so much better.

palm tree

I spent some time making a palm tree here. I saved the leaves and the trunk as seperate non-deformed objects to make reproduction and texturing easier and more versatile.

I experimented with colour and lighting, thought im not sure about the results.

Also, the soft modification tool is a useful one to take note of, making the surface of the sand an easy task.