Art Spotlight: Fisherman's House

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hi there! My name is Sanna. I’m an interactive media student from Finland. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been very interested in interactive digital media and arts, which is why I started pursuing a career in game development. I have former background as a freelance illustrator and I still consider 3D to be a very new area for me. That said, I’m extremely motivated to continually test new things and learn more!

The idea behind Fisherman’s House was to test my skills on 3ds Max and try out something I hadn’t really done before. I sketched a picture of a small cottage in the middle of the woods and decided to loosely base my model on that sketch. I already knew that I didn’t want to go for the most realistic look possible, but rather for something simple and stylized.

After the sketch was done, I started modeling right away. I tried to keep the poly count to as low as possible, even though I knew the model would only be used as a practice piece. I started off with the basic shape of the house and modeled the door, windows and other parts separately as their own objects.

Next up was the part I was the most afraid of: UV-mapping. Thankfully my model was simple enough to cause no problems in terms of figuring out how to project the shapes onto the UV map. In hindsight I see a lot of things that could be improved and I would definitely resize and move things here and there. But as I said before, this is the part that I just wanted to get over with quickly, so the quality of the UV map wasn’t my number one concern at the time.

I imported the UV map into Photoshop and started working on the textures. I have quite a lot of background in digital painting so this was surely the easiest phase of the entire process. I ended up changing a few things, like the color of the walls and the window frames. This is simply because I ended up liking the result more.

Before this point, I hadn’t really considered making anything else. Initially I was only going to do the house and then move on to a different project. Yet, after modeling and texturing the house I felt like it needed a bit more something to make it look “alive”, so to speak. So, I figured I’d give the house a little pier to sit on, since the house kind of reminded me of those small fisherman houses you could spot in old seaside towns.

The process for the pier and all the other “accessories” didn’t differ much from the house, except that I didn’t have a sketch to base my designs on. I just simply modeled the first things that came to my mind when I was thinking of a seaside house: Barrels, a fishing rod, some rope and maybe a bench or stool of some sort.

The final step was posting my model for everyone to see. I had heard of Sketchfab from a few friends of mine and I decided that to be the place to post my art. I spent a lot of time playing around with the light and post processing settings and I’m pretty happy with the result! There’s always things that could be improved or fixed but at least this was an extremely good learning experience!

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to write this post! I’m very happy to see that so many people have liked Fisherman’s House! Talk about a motivation boost, haha!
To see more of my art, you can follow me on my blog at sannart.tumblr.com!

Looking forward to seeing a ton of amazing stuff from you guys as well! :)

See ya!

– Sanna