Apparently I can be happy with my work.. who knew?
The past two game production products I've been relatively happy with the outcome - and obviously I could always do better, do more, and so on, but a standard I'm content with is quiet nice.
And yes, I may be procrastinating from the visual design vehicle project a bit by writing this blog entry.. but I hate vehicles. And presentations.

So the current project is to design a building which will fit between two provided, fully textured meshes. So I naturally went with my first cliche thought to do a Chinese restaurant.

Well, not really just a Chinese restaurant. Mainly inspired by the scene in the movie "Spirited Away" when Chihiro's parents are turned into pigs - more of an outside buffet idea. Ideally, I wanted to give it an appearance of a converted apartment building - a sure safe way to maintain the brief and make my design fit between the two buildings provided. Basically, taking typical, traditional Chinese shapes and applying them to a store-front styled design, with an open buffet/seating area 

 The one thing I was looking forward to about this project was the amount of baking I would be doing to a lot of the geometry - not necessarily having a strict, low tri budget meant I didn't have to be as strict with certain geometry - for example the roof canopy could actually have geometry and maintain its silhouette somewhat, but I doubt I could have a 10,000 tri asset attached to the scene and explain it somehow.

I even baked a little mooncake. It was a bit pointless, but I couldn't resist.

The final result I'm overall please with the appearance - it conveys what I wanted to, despite the fact I may have been a tad lazy/apprehensive to attempt parallex mapping to create a kitchen scene within the openinn and instead added shutters. I could have used more decals however, to grime up the place - however with the limited texture budget we had I didn't want to include too many details which would be blurry and distorted on the final object.