Though I am working in the animation industry, I am an architect and I really like experiencing architectural spaces. My favorite architectural spaces are human scaled, soft lit, old architecture. I do not enjoy the feeling of cold steel and glass. So, though I worked with architectural visualisation for about 8 years, I didnt really enjoy the job and I decided to model the architecture in my mind, which I think was the correct choice.  

Idea: The first stage was finding out a good subject on which I wanted to work . The primary idea for this image came from a photograph that I had seen a number of years prior. That photograph included an arch and a door facing it. I thought the contrast between the slightly shaded atmosphere of the area covered by the arch and the well lit area in front of it including the old wooden door would be a subject matter to catch the eye and the smooth shadows and slight blue color that comes from a cloudy sky and would add a silent and calm atmosphere to the composition. All the other elements are carefully placed in the scene to bring out rich shadows and depth.  

Sketching: I did not draw any sketches by hand for this work, but I did do 2 or 3 mock-ups utilizing 3D MAX. Those were useful developing the modelling technique and lighting.  

Modelling: I used real life dimensions in centimeters. I started with a very simple but quite large box. which was about 10x10x10 meters. Than I "carved" the volumes in it. Thats not the usual method for architectural modelling, but it worked well for this image. Using nearly 10 meter high walls helped me to attain the reflected soft light over them.   My model was very simple in the beginning, but parallel with the development of the process, it became complicated. I detatched the surfaces that I would work with and started working on them in detail.   For the walls, I used a noise modifier to give them a rough geometry. I then added cracks and holes to them. I always chamferd the corners 2 or 3 times to break the unnaturally perfect look.  

For the doors, I did almost same thing. All the corners of the doors are chamfered to rid them of sharpness.  

For the floor and the right wall, I went further. I detached those surfaces, subdivided them, painted a specific texture to use as a displacement map, and then collapsed the modifier stack and retouched some corners vertex by vertex to get perfected joints between the wall and floor. I wasn’t satisfied with only a "bump" map because the shadows that a bump map can produce are very weak. My goal was to get real shadows from real stones.   All other objects: Pots, lamps, post box etc. were modified by hand as described above, to get rid of the unnaturally perfect look.   The modelling process took more than 40 hours. I modelled the floor at least 3 times. I didn’t finish the modelling process until I was satisfied with the result.    

Texturing: The texturing process was the hardest part, but it was also lots of fun. I wrote a story for all the walls. They got wet and dried many times. Some parts of them are very old, some parts had been repaired many times. Other parts are in need of repaired. The family who lives behind these walls is not rich, but neither are they poor. Actually, they are simply an average Medditerrannean family. It is also possible that this village is close to the sea. I am not entirely certain myself. This is the scenario of the life in this street, so I dreamed about the walls of this street. 

I have a huge collection of photographs in my archive. Before starting a project like this, I survey a lot of the details of my project. In this case, I made a study of the walls. While painting textures, I started with a very new, but small wall photograph, then I developed it by painting by hand and copying textures onto this image, and finally I applied cracks and some other dirt into the texture. I take photographs all the time and I have a collection of dirt maps of my own. Also I have some dirt maps that I have found from the net.

The hardest part of the texturing process was the floor. The main texture of the floor was a photograph. First, I rendered the "gray model" of my floor plan, then in my photo editing software, I carefully rearranged the stones such that none of the stones are cut prematurely by the walls. Than I cloned this floor texture and transformed it into a "gray scale" image. I selected all of the stone outlines and made them lighter. After this, I selected the mortar between to place between them and made it darker. Thus, my displacement map was completed. I then cloned the original floor texture and generated another gray scale image for use in the bump mapping. The whole process took about 15 hours.