Ancient Spaces Blog

Hi there! I am Tom Wu. I am in my fourth year of Engineering Physics at UBC. My position is 3D artist, texturer or just Visual Content Engineer(VCE) so far...

My assigned academic is a Fine Arts professor for the Incan Architecture, so I am in charge of creating 3D models and textures for the Incan ruins and the reconstruction of Incan cities. The city I am working on is Machu Picchu. It has some very unique characteristics; for example, terraces built on 60-80 degrees sloped mountain surfaces and weird stone pieces that perfectly interlocks each other so that the ruins have been around for a few hundred years.

I started off with the Three-Temple group structures in the West Side. I did the Sacristy first, and then the Principle Temple. Matt, another VCE, did the Temple of Three Windows and the Pirca. Each structure has its own unique characteristics, especially the stone sizes, patterns and colours. Each stone tells a story. I will only go as far as that...

As of now, Matt and I have completed all structures in the Three-Temple group and we are working on the terrain for scene so that when the editor is ready, we can start placing buildings in the whole area.

For now, I am taking a break from the terrain and moving onto the buildings on the Intiwatana hill. Buildings are more fun to do than terrain because the terrian plans aren't completely accurate. Nevertheless, textures are the toughest part of my tasks. Believe it or not, they can take as much time as 5x of modeling. Extreme PS skills needed.

Anyways, this project so far has been fun and challenging, although texture editing could become tedious... sometimes... It's still a great learning experience.