Updating the Modern Home

No new renders to show today because I'm at a point in the process where the house is a disassembled, disorganized mess that doesn't much resemble a house.  But I have finished 99% of the garage inside and out, 99% of the exterior of the house, and have moved inside to finish up the modeling and texturing there.

This involves a lot of things that can quickly get tedious, complicated, and confusing.

First I started out with the more straightforward aspects, researching some designs for antique Craftsman style interior doors, casings, baseboards, and crown moldings, then modeling those in separate Max files and applying UVW mapping to them.

After that, I go into the Modern Home file and begin dissecting it.  This initial dissection won't be nearly as involved or complete as the final cut-up (where each wall, floor, roof, and other elements will be completely isolated), but allows me to get inside the house easily while still having all the walls up.

Up first, once the dissection is complete, is to do the final modeling on the first floor.  Initially this is just blocked in as a solid shape that fills the proper amount of space, but has no detail.  Using that rough block as a guide, I build all the framing and floor joists.  I have to do this because the basement ceiling is unfinished and the exposed joists and beams need to be visible.  The second floor/first floor ceiling won't have to go through this treatment since none of the framing will be exposed.

Once the floor was rebuilt, I imported the door and trim pieces.  Quickly I realized that a few of my door openings are either too small or not placed in quite the right position to allow room for the super wide 5" door casings I chose.  A quick edit of the floor plan allows me to widen the stairwells and slide the doors over a little bit to make room.  This also necessitates widening the stairs.  The process only takes a couple minutes, but I'm left with a closet door that can't be moved or widened, but still doesn't have enough room on the sides for the 5 inch casing.  On the plate for tomorrow is researching ways around that.  Maybe I can use a narrower casing, or maybe I simply chop off the existing trim.

While I'm editing the stairwell I take an opportunity to add an archway between the living room and dining room, then it's on to duplicating, resizing, and placing all the doors and trim.  As it stands right now, I have all the interior doors on the first floor in place, with their casing, and about half of the baseboards.  Tomorrow I will finish installing those, as well as the crown moldings, and then begin trimming the windows.

Originally, I left the windows and the exterior doors trimmed the same way as the Farmhouse, but I will probably swap that trim out for the new pieces I designed today.

By the end of tomorrow I should be on to modeling the kitchen counters and cupboards, as well as the plumbing fixtures for the kitchen and bath.  I will also need to bring in light switches and receptacles from my prop library and distribute those around the house.  When the first floor is finished I will move to the second floor and do the same up there.

Overall, I am a little bit behind where I wanted to be at the start of this weekend, but I think things are going well and I'm very much on track for hitting my deadline.

If I am able to start importing individual pieces of the house into Daz and Poser tomorrow, I should have the first test renders of the interior, and will post those here.

Now, back to work!