Digitising my college - Skip to the showpiece!
Overview
Over the christmas break from college a few friends and I thought it might be interesting to make a small 3D model of our classroom as something to fill our spare time. This gradually turned into a four month long project which we each put hundreds of hours into resulting in an extremely detailed and perfectly to scale model of our entire college campus.
Planning
The first step to this was to get measurements and create a sort of schematic of the building, this would prove to be very complicated as there were none online so I had to create designs of each room and then fit them all together. I began by using the distance tool on google maps to get a vague outline of the building as an initial reference and then we went through as a group hand measuring the rooms whilst one of us took photogrammetry scans using their phone. All of this data was combined into floor plans which were scaled and used for the rest of the modelling process.
Whilst this was being done we took several thousand photos of everything from bins to computers to make sure that we had data of every single item in the entire building, this was later collated by me into a spreadsheet of every single object in the building. I then went through this in most cases finding product listings for every single item and categorising them with reference images to be modelled later.
Development
Once the initial planning was done we began working through the model. First one of us created meshes of the rooms with their walls and floors while another did the outside of the building and I handled the surrounding landscape and roads. Once these initial models were completed and pieced together we then divided up the model list between us and gradually created near perfect models of every single object in the building, before placing them in their actual locations using all of the references we gathered earlier. This was an extremely complex multi month process with all meshes and materials being made entirely from scratch.
The final product
Clearly some elements have been skipped over in this explanation as it was all a bit of a blur, however the project really speaks for itself and exhibits some cutting edge technologies with photogrammetry, texture reproduction, and interior cube map shaders inspired by the game "Spider-Man". I think the video of the project speaks for itself.