Squidward's House

 The biggest challenge for Squidward's house was finding a Moai statue that was small enough to scan. Many replicas are made as garden ornaments but these would have been too big to scan and too expensive to acquire. Some replicas are made for fish tanks which would be the perfect size but some are already made to look like Squidward's house with openings for the eyes and mouth so this would have made it too easy for the aim of my project.

I found some cheap versions online that were unaltered replicas of the Moai statues. They came with two size variations so I had some options when it came to making the scan.

Because these statues came with a body as well I didn't have to worry about elevating it about the paper base because I would be removing part of the body anyway. The first scan I did was mostly a good quality except there was some large gaps around the right ear block.

I originally kept working with this model and started repairing the holes but after a day of working I realised that it was more effort than it was worth and I was slowly lowering the quality of the model by stretching and warping the topology and texture.

My second scan came out in much better mesh quality and any imperfections with the texture could be changed in Substance. I started cleaning up my second model straight away now knowing how best to work around the object itself. The only major change I made was the rounding of the back face. Since Squidward's house is circular at the base I had to use the soft select tool to pull the concave faces of the object backwards into a somewhat natural curve. After scaling and tweaking the faces with soft select it was ready for the modelling.

For the portholes, I was able to reuse the ones from Spongebob's house. In the case of the back window I used the same portholes but removed all but 4 edge loops leaving the remaining ones evenly spaced. This turned the round portholes into a square window with no effort.

I knew, before modelling the door, that I would use the area underneath the closed lips to create a dip for the door to fit into. I soft selected the corners of the mouth pulling it down to create more of an arch. I pushed the faces in the middle of this arch backwards to create the space and brought some vertices from the sides to match the depth of the mouth-arch.

The door itself is made of a stretched cube with bevelled edges to create the illusion that there is space between these joined planks. Once I had placed all of the planks I created the shape that I wanted the door to be using a cube and bevels and using the booleans intersection tool to cut the planks to the shape of the door. The door handle was a simple cylinder bevelled at the end to round it and then various holding loops creating the geometry that would meet with the door. After a simple

of the door UV it was ready for texturing. 

Texturing the windows and floor was simple enough by reusing the main parts from Spongebob's Substance file. I created a smart material for the portholes rather than starting from scratch to recrate the same thing. I turned off the layers for the path from the ocean floor material and added a wood texture with raised height information and masked it to make the wooden plank path leading to the door. The door was kept basic with a modified wood material with various dirt and grime and the handle was left as the default substance brass material. After recolouring any seams and bad scan artefacts it was finished.

Again grabbing a normal map from this website for the statue itself, I was ready to import to UE4. Once I had the enum set up for this model I started creating a blueprint for the lights like I had made for Spongebob's. This was a little tedious as I made some modifications and had to re-place the light transforms but once it was working it looked great.

Having all three finished houses is a great collection for the museum, all three challenged me in different ways and I found new ways to combine modelling with photogrammetry.