Modelling southend pier...

I began by starting to model the platform. I used a box with a large number of segments so that i could add detail by extruding etc... Here is a section of the pier:


I could now copy this many times to create a long pier all with the sam intricute detail. To copy, I held shift and moved the segment along. I also added some street lamps, bins and benches to make the model more intricute and mroe life-like.


I did the same process to create the large open area at the end of the pier. Here is the pier in all it's glory:


Next up I wanted to put some materials to the pier. I used the sub/divided material option again to choose different polys to assign materials to. This means I could change different parts of the pier. For example, the pier legs were materialised using a texture I modified in Photoshop. I got an image of old wood and then tinted the bottom green to look like algae.



No UVW unwrap was needed for this as it seemed to fit perfectly as it was. Here is the pier with the materials added.


I used a wooden plank texture for the pier walk way. I added a bump with the same bitmap and set it to fairly high. This turned out very well and looks realistic.


Now I have to concentrate on the omni lights. I needed to put one in to create a sunset that gives out an orange/yellow/pink light. I also put another one in, closer to the scene and assigned a glow affect to it. This made it look like a hazy sun set. The pink and yellow lights combine to give a fantastic evening effect.


I could now create the water. I did this by creating a large plane and assigning a material to it. The material has a noise bump on it at the correct size to make it look like calm water. The water also has a reflection raytrace. This reflects surroundings to give a very realistic effect. The water is also slightly coloured to a brown/green colour which shows up in places of shadow. The water at the moment looks very blue, but this is because there is nothing for it to reflect as the sky is not in place.


You can see how the lighting is working on the water.


Now i need to create a sky. As the water is going to be reflecting the sky and all surrounding, It needs to be all over the top, like a real sky would be. To do this I created a cylinder big enough to cover the whole scene. In the drop down menu, in th editor I changed it to 'standard' which allows you see inside it in perspective mode. I then found an evening sky image and assigned it to the cylinder. Here is the complete scene.