This is my first Blockout. Tried to get a good fit to the original scene but with a New York 1940s feel based on the ref I collected. This is for composition purposes mainly

 I have put together some ref for this

1940's New York. Nighthawks was painted in 1942 so I figured this it would make sense to look at the architecture and lifestyle of the time for inspiration. I am think of using the high line overhead railway for the bridge sections and filling the rest of the scene with maybe some old school neon, redbrick period buildings and some landmarks in the distance.

  I have also made a mood board of Edward Hoppers work to get a feel for lighting and tone. I am currently thinking about making a hand painted textures and a custom post process to make it feel more painted looking but this could end up looking pretty rubbish so I will need to do some R&D

  It seems odd to finally get a look at this now the company is no more. I thought I would have a go at the Gotham art test because it reminded me of the good old days of texturing simple geometry. I am not following it too strictly but really just using it for practice.

It says in the test they do not tile anything  but I will as it seems like a waste to not too. I decided that I want to do one 1024 texture Max per building

I started with laying out the construction texture first and trying to find in the building where I could neatly tile it. This texture is more a way of laying out the zones for the geometry to see what works. I have also dedicated more real estate to the ground floor and anything with text on.

The initial geometry pass will then be built around this template. I will then go back to the texture and make it complement the geometry. at least thats the plan!

Construction texture: A bit rough around the edges!

Here is the first pass of the front facde with constuction texture applied, it is useful for me to do things this way as i can see what needs the most work and how far off the final texture I am.

Extraction of quad data from Kinect and smoothed out by averging vertices and applying the 2d camera data back on to the model. Interesting use of the technology. I am currently looking at using it for MOCAP.