Heating Up

I'm having so much fun working with Vitaly to get our saloon built out.  Recently, I paid to get some photography time at the Clear Creek History Park in Golden (just down the street).  It's this great collection of western cabins that are kept up and are stocked with great western era relics.  So I got to drop in a cold snowy day and photoscan several of their furnaces and wood cook stove.  I would have like to stay longer and scan a bunch of the available props but I got what I came for.

I processed out the RAW images and threw them into Agisoft Photoscan.  Aligned the photos, generated point clouds and then meshed it.  I built a rough texture and sent it all over to Vitaly with a handful of the original images.  Then he repaired the high poly version and built a low poly version.  Baked it all, created LOD's et cetera.  And here is the beautiful small furnace asset.  This is why I love photoscanned assets and Vitaly's work. :)

We played around with where it will go in the saloon and settled on a central location where it's heating would be most useful (instead of the corner location shown in the images below).

Table & Chairs

But let's be really clear here.  Although there are quite a bit of scanned assets involved in this production, Vitaly's artwork is the real star.  Here he generously shares his workflow with us via these two "making of" videos.  Here he is developing the chairs and tables that will populate our saloon.

He'll create multiple levels of detail for each and also created two versions of this chair.

Piano

Ah, those quintessential western details like the upright piano.  Vitaly has done a masterful job of giving all our assets "history" with aging details like the worn and broken keys and the missing cover with it's left over hinge and raw wood joints.  There echoes of age all over this piano and it helps us all believe it really lives somewhere in the west and possibly took a bumpy journey to get here.

We are really looking forward to standing in this environment in VR and just drinking in the details.  Heck we are really looking forward to interacting with and unfolding story in this environment too!  Until, then we'll keep stuffing it with rich details of both beauty and age.