St Mawes Breakdown
Back in June of 2017, I had the pleasure of traveling to St. Mawes, a town just across the bay from Falmouth. I loved its charm and found it to have a Cornish tropical feel to it. This particular street caught my eye with rich white buildings and cozy cobblestone street. When I was given creative freedom for a 3D environment in my CGI Environment course at Griffith University, I immediately stepped to take up the challenge to recreate this shot. In the end, I think I succeeded.
I modeled and textured everything except for the plants, those were used from Xfrog's plant catalogue, and the trees are just billboards of photos with the alpha channels hidden, again from the Xfrog Plant catalogue. I used a cloudy HDR sky that was provided by my professor because the sunny one, I had my hands on gave a bit too sharp shadows on the buildings. It was no easy road getting here, due to the Perspective of the shot. I learned quickly that my single photo wouldn't be enough.
These was one of my first attempts catching the composition, but you'll notice I initially distorted the buildings to get that perspective. My profesor suggested for my to change the camera focal length to achieve the perspective, which helped, but I still struggled. I needed to know the distance between the building and the length of the steps; I needed more reference.
I remembered that I had made a basic overhead map using Google Earth photos for my original design brief. The Raw Google Earth image would help me in the end, but I still needed more reference. By providence of God, my friend Dom happened to be living right next this street for the Summer, who went and took additional photos for me. In addition to this, I went to Google Maps Street View and Screenshoted additional reference. Here is a Mood board consisting of my friend's photos and the ones I found on Street View.
One of the most helpful observations to note is the steps, I saw the size fluctuated and at times was quite large. This helped me get the spacing for the background buildings. With all this reference at hand, I did, as my friend Dom put it, Maya CSI to build it.
With the basics blocked out, I was finally able to model out the details.
Once I finally escaped UV Purgatory, I was able to texture the objects. Using textures.com, I was able to find great textures as a basis and manipulated them as needed in Photoshop. Plus I added in the models and Billboard from XFrog.
After placing in a Cloudy HDR, it was finished.