New Project: Tunisian Courtyard

After finishing my underground project I needed something else to get my claws into. I am starting a new project and this time it challenges me some more.

A year ago I visited Tunisia with my lovely girlfriend. A lot of the scenery is quite nice and some of the ruins at Carthage had some great texture to them. However it was in Sidi Bou Said, where I discovered some real gems. All the buildings were painting in white and blue which sounds quite odd but makes the place look really pretty and uniform.

In this one particular area is a museum of traditional dress, furniture and architechture and a nice courtyard. Its here that is the project.

This is my favourite image of the courtyard and I intend to recreate it in 3D. I might extend the right of the image to incorporate something original but still fitting with the image.

I also have other reference images which I will use to create statues, tiles, chairs, tables, signs, bird cages (They have lots of birdcages in tunisia)

What looks like a glorified rotoscoping of the images, is actually a visual guide to help with polygons in the scene. Which areas will be dense, which areas are quite sparse. It also helps to work out compromises and also just generally break down the scene into its different components.

I think the challenging components for this project will be the plants and foliage (something which I have little experience with) and also I think it will be harder to craft the realism compared to say indoor images. Things like the statues, pottery and plants will also help me to become better with the pipeline between Maya and Mudbox for sculpting and hopefully try some texture painting.