This image was created using Lightwave for all 3D-work and Photoshop for textures and post-processing. Most of the material for the textures was taken from the complete "Total Textures” collection of www.3dtotal.com.

My intention was to create a very detailed architectural scene. I was aiming at a natural look with dirty surfaces, old and broken materials. I choose a motive that I got to see almost every day: A decayed house from a town nearby the place I work.
Locations like that house can have a strong appeal, especially when you can imagine its whole history just by looking at one image of it. So this is what I wanted to capture in my image: A place with a story, a strong feeling of history

Modelling

The house was made of several smaller buildings. So first thing, I created planes representing the top view of the house. Then these planes were extruded. To get the walls, the top polygons were beveled inwards. After the walls were complete, windows and doors were cut with Boo lean. Frames were put into the window and door holes to create smoother edges


I wanted the roof to be made of roofing cardboard, so I only had to create some large polygons without any structure. The detail here is achieved later with textures. To get rid of sharp edges, other rounded polygons had to be created for every gab and edge. For the outer borders, angles were used to represent sheets of metal. These metal parts were used all around the roof to create transitions between the different materials.


Since the scene was intended for use in images and animation, it is supposed to look good from all points of view. This required all parts, which were attached to the basic geometry, to be created at a high level of detail.
Windows and Shutters were created from boxes. After the first window was done, it was copied and modified. All window-glasses were broken in a different way. The broken glass was created with polygons instead of textures, because there were only small pieces of glass left.



Doors were made in a similar way. The wooden doors had larger surfaces, so UV maps were created before copying to make texturing easier.
It is always a good idea to create the UV's as early as possible - something I usually forget.