Prada Marfa: Building Structure
fter going back and forth in my head about starting this project, I finally bit the bullet and decided it was time to give it a try. A few months ago when I decided to get serious about 3D modeling, I created a list of places, people, and objects that I wanted to create in my own image. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a majority of the stuff that made it to the list was related to fashion. I figured I'd do a collection of luxury store fronts - some fashion and some entirely made up in my head. I didn't want to overwhelm myself too much so I decided to start simple - Prada Marfa.
If you're unfamiliar with Prada Marfa, it's essentially an art installation that's setup in the middle of nowhere Marfa, Texas. It looks like a Prada boutique with one key thing missing - people! Although I haven't gotten the chance to travel to Marfa to view the structure, I always dreamed that one day I would.
What's funny (well, maybe not funny) about the entire ordeal is that at one point, people thought the items inside the structure was actual real Prada merchandise. One thing led to another and some people vandalized the building and stole what they thought were valuable items. Little did they know that everything in there is fake! Could you imagine spending time conjuring up a plan Oceans 11 style only to end up with a bunch of worthless items? I guess that's what they get for choosing to steal.
In any case, I sat down today to start the structure of the building. It's very blocky with no real frills. That's just what I needed for my first true 3D modeling project.
3 hours, ya'll. 3 hours is what it took me to create this structure. I can't believe it took me so long (ok, yes I can). I kept making simple mistakes with loops cuts and didn't follow my own advice to plan ahead. I got so excited that I completely ignored the fact that I should've planned in advance where I'd do my cuts. I did manage to find reference images before starting - which was really helpful. I got the building at three key angles: the front, side, and a view of the back.
You may notice that the first image of the front is actually different than the back image. I just noticed that while typing - go figure. I guess at some point they did away with the glass in the back and made it solid. Not sure what I'll do about that.
My first mistake was extruding the bottom base on all sides when in actuality, it only extrudes on the left and right side. The next thing that gave me a problem was extruding the door inwards. I thought I was finished at one point until I turned the building to it's side angle and noticed that I had a face protruding from the side. I could've screamed! That was also around the time that I discovered the default 32 CTRL-Z limit. Who knew that Blender would only undo 32 actions by default? I quickly increased it because thanks to it, I had to start over from scratch after realizing my door frame was going to extrude weird.
And finally, the stairs. Man, the stairs were initially a challenge for me! I knew I had to take a face and extrude it down, however, it left me with a perpendicular face that didn't follow suit. I ended up deleting a couple of faces and then joining the loop altogether - and it worked!
One thing I learned early on while starting this building was that I needed to keep a base copy of the building pre-extrusions on deck in case I had to start over - which happened a lot. At one point, Blender (more so, human error) did something funky and ended up with a mesh sitting inside a mesh. What ended up happening was that when I tried to inward extrude (intrude?) the faces for the windows and doors, I couldn't see it move inward. Plus, Blender was doing that thing where the faces get all fuzzy which typically indicates that there's another mesh aligned with the mesh.
Now that this part is done, I'm going to give myself an easy win for the next task and work on the building signage and awnings.
