Environment: Building a Restaurant

My next task for the short film was to work on the buildings for the city. I had two designs in mind: one generic building we could recolor and line the streets with, and the restaurant. The restaurant is significant because it's where the story starts and ends so it should get to be unique.

I made a generic base to model them from, a polygon with 3 faces to each side.

The generic building

The restaurant.

The restaurant was considered more important so I spent time texturing it first. I liked the look of building in the picture below, it felt kind of elegant to me and the restaurant is supposed to be a classy establishment where Rags sees the Lady in Red.

Exterior

Bottom front. The window is transparent.

I tried to texture transparency onto the window; at the moment it is completely invisible, but I think there may be a way to solve it that doesn't involve revamping the whole model. The transparency is done by using black, white and presumably shades of grey.

The transparency map. It is not very impressive at the moment.

The white of the map are the opaque parts and the black is transparent. So here, the black rectangle is the part that is the window pane. I think if I find the right shade of grey, I can get a transparent piece that is still slightly visible instead of an empty frame.

The interior

More interior. Here is the door from the inside.

The interior is actually a box inside the main building. I did it this way because I wasn't sure how we would be able to texture the inside part to look like a room if they were part of the same piece.