The 5%

I believe this is the first bit of 3D that I've put up here, hopefully not the last.
This project was to find an interesting old building and model it I choose the "XY" building in the town centre:

This project was set over 3 weeks and it was a pain in the ass  challenge to do, for a variety of reasons. The fact that all of the reference photos initially took were in awkward perspectives  meant they weren't ideal for texturing, or reference in general. Going back to retake these photographs I realised that there was actually no way I could position myself to get rid of this perspective, so I had to suck it up and just adjust the heck out them, if I wanted any kind of decent texturing.

So there was that.

There was also the fact that my model was terribly flat. you see there are windows on this building, there are no windows on my bare model, I thought the textures would take care of that part, see above issues with the texturing.

I also spent the first week trying to model this building:

which quickly just became dull to me. the individual aspect of this building appealed to me, but the building as a whole, not so much.

But the biggest issue I found was just staying motivated. Because I don't really know what I'm aiming for. Since I'm fairly new to 3DS Max I have no idea what "good" looks like. I know what good looks like in the general sense, as my aim was to make a realistic model of the XY, but I had no idea how close I could get to that within the specification without just doing it. So I have what I like to call "It'll looks crap until it's finished" syndrome where 95% of the time I look at my work and think: "Oh God, this is so terrible what was I thinking? why am I still doing this? what am I even doing?" With the 5%of my thinking at the end being: "Ok this works." So it's really just powering through that 95% until I can make sense of it all.

With this model the 5% came after I added lights, placed my model on a plane and rendered it out.

Ok this works..

There are of course issues with the finished model, and things I would add, but I am pretty happy with how this turned out in the end, and glad that I actually made it to the 5% Stage of thinking, instead of uninstalling Max and curling up in a corner somewhere.

On a final note, when researching this building, I found out it was a night club. Completely ruined it for me.