Today was another modeling day.  It’s starting to look pretty decent.  I finished up the convenience store and added a vintage gas station to the end of the street.  I’ve definitely been pushing verto hard so I’ve been running it in the debugger just to make sure I catch any serious bugs or crashes while I work so that I can fix them on the spot.  I’ve already used the crap out of my instancing feature and fingers crossed, it’s working pretty well.

I got to use my shader builder feature today while working on the gas station parking lot which felt awesome.  Being able to quickly hash out shader effects is proving invaluable for this project.  I used the GLSL ‘smoothstep’ function to code a quick-and-dirty solution for cross fading the parking lot with the desert terrain underneath.  Using blending for the entire polygon is not all that efficient but I’ll take that over a more complicated multitexturing solution.

I also drafted up a quick terrain mesh using pixelmator to create a height map.  This is how I’m going to take care of the background scenery with a tall “mountain” range in the background of the street view.

Lastly, I screwed around with the multipass pipeline editor to see what a “noire”-like black and white effect would look like on the scene.  It gives me chills and definitely inspires me to keep working on the project.

Early noire effect

I can’t wait to see what it all looks like when I’m done the texturing.