Inkpot Press

“Inkpot Press” was a pretty comprehensive modeling project. I started out with just creating the blue building to the right but wanted something more to really liven it up. Originally, it was going to be a single turnaround of the blue house but eventually I decided to give it a neighbor. I drew inspiration from an old victorian home I saw during a trip to the San Francisco. I found the house striking and charming at the same time and thought it would be a great model to create. 

The orange building has a bit more of a backstory. I wanted to add a few personal touches to this piece so I started with the name. My brother and I used to write stories and craft our own books when we were kids and the name of our “publishing company” was Inkpot Press. In addition, the newspaper shown in the beginning is actually an issue of The Monterey Herald, my local newspaper. They used to have a cartoon contest where anyone could submit a comic and if it was approved, it would get published alongside all the classic cartoons. The issue shown here has one of my cartoons printed at the very top. 

In this project I used Maya, Substance Painter, C3D and Redshift. This was my first project using the Redshift renderer and I’m sold that it’ll be my daily driver as a render engine. 

The layout of the orange building drew inspiration from the artist Alariko and the original piece can be found here

Detail work done on the victorian house roof
Wireframe detailing on the victorian roof

This project was also my first exposure to using Redshift. I made sure to customize all texture templates to be compatible with Redshift and textured the entire model using it. I used masking techniques on complex models like the telephone pole which combined multiple UV layouts into a single UV map which meant that I was able to consolidate the amount of files each model would take up. 

Redshift proved to be the best engine I’ve used so far not only because of how fast it was, but because I no longer have to compromise on image quality. Redshift enabled me to render images with more complex scene information like global illumination and depth of field. This process was much faster on this engine and I can see it has potential in other long term projects. 

Below are some images of various maps and UV layout techniques used for the modeling on the narrow house.