savetheclocktower

I learned Blender a while back to make assets and am scraping the rust off of my knowledge so that I can make some LA-style Dingbat apartments — because their absence on the workshop is keenly felt. I've got about six of them in various stages of completeness, and I like how they're turning out so far, but I feel like they're missing a certain something and I'm curious if some of the more prolific modelers in the community notice anything obvious that I could improve. Here's my favorite of the ones I've made so far, based on 7954-7958 Oakwood Ave: Things I think I'm doing right: Trying to use a single texture sheet (1024x2048) for all six apartment complexes. I've heeded Ronyx69's advice about not making textures too bright or too dark and have tried to adjust levels on all materials — Dingbats are stucco boxes, so it's important for the plaster facades not to look too bright. My instincts tell me that the buildings look more realistic when the edges and corners are more sharply defined, so I've added a bit of grime on the edges of my plaster texture so that I've got a darker line to UV-map my corner and edge surfaces against. (This quickly becomes a pain because it's pretty obvious if I forget to do one; I think this works only because plaster is a pretty plain texture and I don't have to worry about seamlessness when doing my mapping). Things I'm still stuck on: Man, the sides seem bland and repetitive. Less so once I throw some window A/C units on these, but still. What do people do to make repetitive parts more interesting? Not sure if I should fix this with props, with different texture mapping choices, or with new geometry. Same question for the roof — since these buildings largely don’t have central A/C, what should I throw on the flat, boring roof to make it less flat and boring? (And how do I make it look darker and less splotchy — i.e., the way it looks on the texture sheet and in Blender?) In all honesty, there should be more grime on these surfaces — a four-unit apartment complex for broke graduate students is not going to get a pressure-wash very often — but if I put more grime on my diffuse texture, I think it'll draw much more attention to the tiling. Plaster is nondescript, but if you see a particular grime pattern three times on the side of a building... I want to make the plaster slightly yellow, a bit on the way to brown, but I feel like I wind up with either bright white or a pretty obvious tan, with nothing in between. Differences in LUTs and mods (Ultimate Eyecandy, Relight, etc.) between users make me wonder if it's even worth it to try to do really nuanced color work. I’m struggling with how to light these realistically at night. My illumination maps need improvement, of course, but past that, lots of dingbats have exterior lanterns on their facades — some funky, some bland. The funky ones I’m resigned to having to make on my own, but I haven’t found a good set of bland exterior house lights that cast a realistic amount of light. I’m playing around with subtle lighting effects and Custom Effect Loader, but then I'm making a random mod a dependency for a prop pack. Is it really this complicated, or am I missing something? I so rarely build or take screenshots at night that I have no sense of what other modelers are doing with external lighting. Some of the bare areas just need props — potted plants in the balconies, a couple of lanterns, some window A/C units, a couple palm trees. But what else am I missing here? If this were your model, what would you do that I haven’t done yet?

You can use crper for this — drop the CRP file onto the page and peek at each of the unpacked assets to see which one is taking up more space than you expected.