Well, there's no better way to learn a tool than to just get your hands dirty with it.
To really test my understanding of #UE5's #GeometryTools and #Lumen lighting solution, I am attempting to recreate #TadaoAndo's 1989 "Church of the Light" inside #UnrealEngine5; using ONLY its editor tools to build all the meshes.
Everything that you see here was created today over a couple of hours from scratch, and this is the progress so far. All the geometry that you see was created using the editor's Modeling Mode. The materials were borrowed from their starter content, and a couple of textures were modified. My focus was only the modeling workflow.
I did get carried away with the lighting at the end though, a little something to treat myself.
I'll be documenting the process a little in this blog post, which I've kept out of social media so as not to bore everyone.
The first step was to set up some references, such as a floor plan drawn by Tadao Ando and was gifted in honour of Philip Johnson. Beautiful drawing. I made sure the polygon created matched the aspect ratio of the image exactly, and was to-scale. I fully intend to run my game avatar through the space when I'm done. The material was also modified slightly so I could see more clearly through it.
The modeling work begins! Once you turn on "Modeling Mode" in UE5, you get a huge library of tools at your disposal. For my purposes, it was just good ol' polygonal modeling - grabbing faces of a polygon and stretching them around, adding only when more details are required. Building up the shell of the building is quick work with UE5's handy gizmos and boolean tools. There are definitely quirks and things you'd want to avoid, so once you accept it, you can plan around it. For example, you don't want to use multiple, intersecting shapes and running a boolean at once. Also, be careful deleting faces because plugging them back is not so easy.
The #UV_Editing tools are very quick and some of them are very intuitive to use. There are a lot of them though, so it may get confusing trying to pick the right one for the job.
What really tested me was the bench model - it had more fine details and interconnected parts; I couldn't just carve it out of a mass either. What I needed was to build modular parts and duplicate them, I also wanted to work fast. I managed to accomplish all this by just staying within its #PolyEditing tool and never left until it was all done. I have to say there were a few challenges, but it didn't slow me down much. You can definitely make a lot of things in the Modeling mode.
One of Tadao Ando's signature moves was his use of raw, exposed concrete in many of his works. The grooves and little holes that you see on the surfaces are from the wooden formwork used, while the concrete cured inside it. Interesting fact - the wooden floor boards and the benches were all made from the formwork after it was taken down. A very elegant and beautiful design decision. Anyway, the point of this exercise was the modeling, so I borrowed the existing materials and textures but had to modify it slightly. At first, I did it with #Photoshop, naturally. Photoshop's #ContentAware tool is amazingly useful. However, I wanted to try to see if I could get a similar result with its browser-based, free doppelganger, #PhotoPea.
At this point, it was time to call it a day. There is more to be done, but left for later. Although I said I built all this today in a couple of hours, from scratch, the truth is I had already done so over the course of 2 weeks, over and over. Each time I made a mistake or didn't get my desired result, I had to stop, take time to figure out why, and start from scratch again and again.
I was only able to make a smooth run today, for the sake of the video recording, because of all my failures. I wish I could say learning was easy, but it never is and that's ok.
