I've always been fascinated with strange architecture and design, and after learning about the winchester mystery house on a podcast, I thought it would be cool to recreate it digitally to the best of my ability.

Using a variety of online resources, I managed to scrape and reconstruct a low quality model of some of the building:

But this mesh is messy, has far too many polygons, and isn't well optimised for game or web rendering... so I'm forced to rebuild it with simpler geometry, room by room.

If i had all the original photos used to create the mesh, I could probably reproject textures and surfaces while rebuilding the model, or do some other fancy stuff like generating a better quality model than the one I managed to find. Being stuck with only the matterport viewer, reference photos on the internet, and some google maps streetview things someone uploaded, my only option is to figure out what the rooms look like and remake them from scratch.

Which is what I painstakingly did, over a period of about, oh...

...five months

And then I kinda lost interest and put the project to the side for a while, until I got early dev access to s&box, a spiritual sequel to garry's mod!!!

The reason this is so exciting is because it gives me the source engine 2 development environment and tools, which are actually super amazing for designing levels. Source 2 is the engine that valve used to develop half life: alyx and counter strike 2.

I get the geometry into source engine, only to realise that it's not really the right scale for the player.

You see, many games trick you into thinking the world around you is scaled correctly for humans, but things are actually spaced out so much more. trying to bring a human-scaled environment into a game feels really claustrophobic.

So what do I do?

I scale everything horizontally, to make the spaces bigger, while keeping the ceilings at a good height. this mostly works, but now my mesh isn't aligned with the grid, and I'll have to pull some tricks to keep it looking natural.

My only problem now is that everything is untextured and undetailed:

And if building this simple boxy level took 5 months, then actually texturing and detailing the house would probably take a team of 20 artists about 5 years.

I thought I'd give it a try though, and see how far I could get by decorating and detailing the entranceway to the house:

I'm pretty happy with this, even if it took me another few months and drove me a little crazy. there's something theraputic about 3d modelling sometimes, and then there's this absolute abomination.

I think this house is kind of cursed in a way, it's constantly being built, never finished, and my project feels the same. At the rate I'm progressing, I'll never finish this, which is why I'm gonna stop here...

...

Well, I lied, I actually did some more, and here's a couple of pictures of it:

But that's all for now, I promise!

P.S. - Maybe I'll upload the greybox into three.js one day and make it explorable online

maybe..