Architexture Assignment

Four weeks ago I got the assignment to make an old building for Game-production.

So far this has been my favorite assignment because I love architecture and Old buildings. They fascinate me and the more detail the better. So I went searching around Leicester searching for the nicest looking building. I've come across a lot of churches/ old buildings/ ruins. Unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries and I ended up with only a few pictures on my camera. Secretly as I went out I already knew which building I wanted to make so I ended up sticking with the original plan but having enough of alternatives incase this wouldn't work out.  The "energy" building ( made in 1939),

what appealed me the most about this building was the white patterns, the details in them and amount of shapes all over the building. and even though both sides of the building look the same it's still very interesting to see ( an eye catcher to me every time I walk by).

So after making around 50 pictures of the building ( and later on another 20 ) I've started modelling.
My main focus in this project was to bring in as much detail as possible within the texture budged, to learn more about tileable textures and to become better at texturing.  The modelling went fine and proved to be no difficulty at all. The budged was 2500 and while trying to get as close as possible to this budged I decided to build a part of the pavement as well just to make it look slightly more interesting.
The scene ended up with 2468 triangles. Now to safe myself the effort of having to place UV's on exactly the same spot I decided to only make half the building and then after the unwrapping and texturing put symmetry on it. This was working perfect and saved me a lot of time. The texturing however proved to be difficult. I had a lot of unforeseen issues like shading issues halfway a texture, shadows stopping at edges and textures looking differently than when rendered. In the end i managed to fix most of those problems by trial and error. 

this is how the building ended up looking like, I'm quite proud of it and am looking forward to some time off so I can make another one.