So a while back, I posted a thread asking if there were any 3d graphicians around. My intent was to make an unofficial contest for 3d graphics artists to design their own home and I would furnish a prize to the winner ($100 PSN Card, $50 for 2nd/3rd place). Unfortunately, I found out you can't do an unofficial contest on the PS Home forums, so I scrapped the idea.
THREAD
About a month later down the road, flacotanner posted a thread about creating your own home space. It fell off later after the amount of bickering and general graphician e-peen that ran rampant in that thread, and generally the ideas presented weren't really well fleshed out or professional by any long stretch. However, I made a post somewhere in that thread showing some preliminary images that I'll soon show here for my project.
THREAD
So finally I decided, why not make an actual home, and have it as a community project, where we flesh out the intricate details and make a house that people will actually want to BUY and maybe even hand it over to Sony to produce it, based on creating a highly professional work that is both technically feasible and also generic enough that a lot of people can benefit from it, not just a few people. Hell, why not make a few of these, with the input of the community, and let's even go into clubhouses and really run with the idea!
So that said, without further adieu, let's cut to the chase and allow me to introduce you to the first of hopefully many of...
A Quick Tour (btw I'm cutting and pasting mostly from my original thread if you've seen it)
A Side Note: Most of you guys know I just came back from a nasty HDD crash, and as such took some downtime. I was hoping to have some preliminary sketches ready, but I'll have to trust you guys for now to use your imagination.
Overview
(Fig 1. Preliminary overview layout)
The house is a two-story model (this is a ghost shaded view from Rhino 3D), featuring lots of different rooms with different functions and also extra space for expansion.
First Floor
(Fig 2. First floor preliminary layout)
Foyer: As you walk in, you'll be greeted with a directory of the house in front of you as a texture, and behind it a small fountain (particle system). Up above on the balcony you'll see a large video screen playing (not shown), perfect for displaying a "welcome to my home" video for your friends. Towards the back of the foyer will be an area that can be used for a living room, or you can use the back dining room section as a living room.
Art Gallery: Show off your picture frames and sculptures to your friends. In the back is a large rounded area with a sky light, just for getting down the perfect lighting conditions and stunning contrasts.
Office: Your own personal office in Home! Display XML-based RSS recent feeds from your favorite news sources (PS Blogs, Kotaku, Slashdot, etc) as wall furniture that you can select to display the PS3 Browser for those sites. Follow your favorite sports teams and players with the EA Sports Tracker. View weather and local news on the Life with Playstation furniture item, select it to open up LWP and view other cities.
Community Room: Gives you access to the Playstation Home forums, your own personal blogs, as well as other community interaction related features.
"My Garage": Unlock your favorite cars from GT5 and display them in your garage to your friends! Take your car out on the Home Test Track, or race against your friends for the best times on the Home Autobahn.
Dining Room/Living Room: Enjoy a room with contemporary windows for a perfect view of the outside. Make it your way!
(Fig 3. Those stairs... took a long f*cking time to model! (this was an early VRay render of the stairs))
Second Floor
(Fig 4. Second floor preliminary layout)
Game Room: Enjoy a large game room, perfect for arranging pool tables as well as arcade games.
Media Room: Enjoy a quiet room for private viewing of videos and audio.
Rock Band Practice Room: Get some practice, or challenge your friends to quick games of select Rock Band titles in the practice room. Pick up your guitar, drums, or mic, and show off your skills.
So now that you've seen the preliminary idea, why N1s? Simple, we've got some great talent here. I want us to get together, talk about improvements, even share some of the design work (draperies, windows, all kinds of things need to be designed and I want it to be our work, not 3dtotal.com, or some other commercial site, I want something we can put our names on). Maybe even when we get to some point of starting to show this off, even have an N1s meeting about it. When I talked to shungokusatsu about it, his basic response to it was "as long as it doesn't become another suggestions thread". I think this is a great opportunity to allow the N1s meetings to be a platform for community feedback (via the live feed), and so on and so forth, and even go so far as presenting the finished work after optimizations to Sony. I'm hoping this will be one of many spaces, and I want us to have first dibs on this as a group effort, there's a perfect opportunity here to shine, and even extend the idea into clubhouses that we create together.
My challenge is for us to think outside the box, WAY outside the box on this one. Think about the kind of personal space you would love to have that you could actually integrate with your life.
With all of that said, maybe this Internal Discussions forum needs to be constricted to those who attend the meetings? (so jacka**es like Proph won't get his lackeys to try and get this idea and run with it)
So, what do you guys think?