Collective3d Blue Collar Neighborhood Sets RFC

Collective3d

Hi folks!

First off I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who have made the Blue Collar Neighborhood sets my most popular sets available on any 3d site. The response to them has been great, and I couldn't afford to keep doing them without all your support, so again, big thanks to everyone.

Development is continuing on the product line so I thought I would pop in here with a Request For Comments, to kind of see what everyone is looking for in urban/suburban residential environments, and to talk a bit about what's actively in development right now.

The big news is that I am working to have sidewalks/driveways/lawns for all the Blue Collar pieces ready for publication by the end of the year. The Modern Homes line have all included them, so it's only fair that the Blue Collar pieces do as well. These will be added to the existing sets so that everyone who has already bought them can just download those as part of the original package.

As it was originally designed, the Blue Collar Neighborhood was going to be gigantic in scope, featuring dozens (perhaps hundreds) of different products, to be developed by three Detroit area 3d professionals including myself. But when it came time to actually do the modeling, the other two took their signed contracts and flaked out, which left me holding the bag on a very ambitious neighborhood design and no one to help with the work. Now that I am back at it, though, I have laid out a development plan that will allow me to continue producing the rest of the sets I had originally intended (and hinted at in earlier posts).

First, due to work on a related project (more on that in a second), I realized that greater diversity is required in the Blue Collar Houses. To help with that, today I started work on five additional variations of the low poly bungalows, which will all feature siding and cinderblock or poured concrete foundations. They'll be based off the original geometry but won't be reskins -- there is a lot of new geometry being built onto these to really make them unique variations.

Second, I have also started development on the Blue Collar Ranch, one of the projects a partner was originally contracted to do. It is slightly larger than the bungalow, about 1000 square feet compared to 800. There will be a full interior-exterior, high poly model, and several (5-10) low poly variations for filling out the background.

Third, and the big one, is the development of a high school varsity baseball field. I've been working on it for about two weeks, designing it to fit together with the Blue Collar Neighborhood pieces seamlessly. This set is absolutely gigantic, almost 250,000 square feet of land. I'm designing it so it can be used as part of the Blue Collar Neighborhood, but also so it can be used independently without the need to generate or load in a lot of extra background geometry. It is surrounded 360 degrees by walls that vary from 8 to 16 feet in height so for most normal camera angles the horizon and the ground outside the park can't be seen. Following from there, perhaps a similarly designed varsity football field.

That leads me, lastly, to the potential for some even more low, low poly houses that can be used to fill out the far distance in neighborhood scenes. The low poly Blue Collar houses are only around 20k polygons, but when you have hundreds of them in your scene, that starts to add up to a lot. So I am working on plans for some low detail houses that would be 50 polygons or less and would be largely detailed with textures rather than geometry, so you could load 1000 of them into a scene without a huge hit on performance.

I would like to hear what the folks who are using these sets in their scenes would like to see in the future as well, and any thoughts you might have on what I'm working on at the moment. I'll be looking for replies here, as well as at the Collective3d Facebook page: Here. At the Facebook page I post updates on products in development, release information, and other goodies. Come on by and leave some feedback, and give us a like while you're there. Hope to hear from everyone! Oh, and here is a quick in-progress render of the baseball field as a teaser!