Sims 4 house

Well, this week was a disaster. My arms started to hurt a bit so I took it easy for a couple of days. But before I realised it, I was taking it too easy and Thursday came knocking on my door asking when I'd start modelling. I knew at that point that the weekend was going to be long and unpleasant, I just didn't know how much.

The idea to model a house came from—you guessed it—CG Cookie course (aka another homework submission). At first I thought I might design my own medieval house. I even started drawing some crazy shapes. But since I suck at 2D drawing even more than I do at 3D, I quickly abandoned the idea and went on a hunt for a perfect reference.

...which took several hours. I went back and forth between realistic and fantasy houses, until I finally decided to use a design from the Sims community. The house is called Frederikson and (at the time) seemed to be an ideal blend of an interesting layout and do-ability. Now, the modelling part wasn't all that bad. The biggest issue was to stick to the requirements and create everything with realistic measurements. Sure, there were some hiccups along the way (I'm looking at you Array modifier) but overall, it went pretty well.

Only it was Saturday evening when I finished modelling.

That might not sound that bad but you need to remember that I had to prepare the whole thing for texturing. Which means lots and lots of UV unwrapping, material assigning, and generally testing things out in SP. When you look at it from that perspective, I was utterly and completely screwed.

Each colour represents one texture set

I eventually finished the UV unwrapping. At 16:30. Then a couple of laps between Blender and SP and things started to look... workable. Except for some weird shading on the columns. It kept gnawing at me, so I quickly jumped back to Blender to figure out what the issue was. Turned out that when I applied the mirror modifier, something went terribly wrong and I was left with partially overlapping, duplicated geometry. Just what you want to find a few hours before a deadline.

I fixed it. And then I fixed a million other things that decided to fall apart for no good reason. And then SP started acting up. I had intended to take the stylised reference and turn it into an amazing, realistic-looking house. As it was, I knew I would only be able to do the panelling on the main building and the pattern on the roof. So, of course, I couldn't find any line generator, and the roof refused to cooperate altogether.

I ended up drawing the panelling myself and cursing the brick generator. The horizontal roof looks half-decent, but I just couldn't turn the pattern on the perpendicular one. There is an option to rotate UVs but it stared back at me and did nothing. Oh well, at least I learned to draw straight lines. Yay.

It is now one hour before midnight—also known as "high-time-to-post-this-if-you-don't-want-to-miss-the-deadline-after-all. Let's hope that next week will be less... eventful.