This project is my first self-published models for sale.

Having started my modelling journey with level design and game creation 12 years ago, I have always had a soft spot for creating game assets. With my love for fantasy and D&D, it only seemed natural that I should create some medieval style houses.

These houses are accurate to realistic scale at the time, I have gone through many old documents to find dimensions to work with, and had to intuit based on function, use, and creation where I could not find them.

The textures are a combination of open CC pre-made textures (such as the stonework), generated textures (such as the daub and the roof tiles), and textures handmade in photoshop (wood detailing). I worked with separate materials and shaders for each texture to give myself full control over each aspect, and later baked them together into a single texture file.

I created texture maps in three resolutions - 1K, 2K, and 4K. Each user has separate needs, and offering more options opens the use of the model for VR, game assets, and renders.

The large house has Diffuse maps, Emission maps, Roughness maps, and Normal maps.

After completing the first house, modelling the second house was significantly faster. I had already made assets to be reused (using geometry nodes to make the roof tiles procedural allowed me to easily adapt their shape), and found solutions for surfaces I was bound to work on again.

Once again I created 1K, 2K, and 4K maps for the model. With no external light I did not require an emission map, hence these maps are Diffuse, Roughness, and Normal.

I added a basic interior to the small house, for the purposes of having something inside to allow opening doors and windows. It is not a full interior (as that was outside the brief I made for myself), but whenever I work on an exterior model I find it important to consider the interior layout. If the interior would not make logical sense, you can tell when you look at the exterior, even when looking at the exterior alone. Subliminally, people ask themselves how everything inside connects, how the object they see functions.

These last images are the wireframes of the model. Pay particular attention to the roof tiles. In my first model, these made up a full 19,000 polygons, significantly more than the rest of the house. While modelling the second house, I learned a clever trick with using a normal map over a lower-poly mesh. Needless to say, I corrected that on the larger house too.

The second model also has better edge loops. For the larger house, I decided to model in a patchwork approach (individual floors and details being separate meshes), so for the smaller I challenged myself to create as much of it as possible on the same object.

Both of these options are valid. The smaller house still uses separate meshes for the doors and windows so they can be transformed without affecting the walls and frames, and having separate objects to work with allowed me to iterate on the larger house without having to spend needless time fixing edge flow between each iteration.

The final stats for these models are 12,556 verticies/21,842 polygons for the Large house, and 8,509 verticies/16,037 polygons for the Small house. As I hone my craft, I know these numbers will go down, but for now these models are exactly where they need to be.

Working for publishing has helped me grasp modelling in a more holistic way than before. Not just in appreciating how much work goes into a model after it has taken shape, but in how every choice you make affects something further down the pipeline. A small time save early on can prove to be hours of work at the end, taking the time to build something as an asset will save you work when you need something like it again.

By setting myself a standard to live up to, I avoided the bad habits that come with just modelling for yourself. The lazy fixes, hiding problems with the belief that nobody will know. Instead, I could learn how to actually fix those problems, and let others point out things I did not even know I was supposed to be doing.

It's terrifying publishing things. Putting yourself out there, staking a claim in a tiny bit of the world and saying "This is me. This is what I can do". But it is rewarding. It teaches you so much more than doing things quietly.

If you're an artist, I urge you. Get out there. Stake your claim. Publish something. You'll be so much better for it.

Jane