Café Memoria… what in the world did I get myself into this time?…

Once upon a time, the Handsome (yet Gloriously Fat) Uncle Mugen is skimming through lemmasoft to see what’s going on. By chance I saw “this thread“ in the Work in Progress of Café Memoria. According to the thread…

Café Memoria is a new restaurant in town, run and operated by a woman named Elena Pervova. You, as the male protagonist (Ryne), are curious about this restaurant and decide to eat lunch there. As you enter, you are greeted by a female friend of yours, and the daughter of the owner of the restaurant, Anna, who happens to be quite shy. Since she works here, perhaps this is an opportunity for her to improve. How well do you think she will do?

Normally, I’d read a thread and then move on to the next until I saw this image…

Looks nice but…

Oh… I recognize those! His scene contains a few models I hosted on the Sketchup 3D Warehouse. So this is Café Memoria… looks good enough. In the typical Uncle Mugen fashion, I casually showed it to my peers and asked them what they think of this building… let’s just say we ended up in a nearly (almost) 2 hour debate ranging from why this building isn’t energy efficient to it’s somewhat brutalistic aesthetic. At the end of the debate we have two options… if this building existed in real life, we will…

Retain original structure and retrofit it using Dryvit
Demolish it and Build it from the Ground up using Light Gauge Steel + Dryvit

As a mental exercise, we debated some more but we arrived at the conclusion that it would be more cost efficient to simply tear down the building and build it from the ground up.

OK Boys! Let’s tear this place down! For Science!

So I requested the Sketchup Model Scene to see how bad it is… now, I know the person who made it isn’t an architect or an engineer nor is this a serious building at all but for the sake of fun, I went ahead with this somewhat pointless mental exercise and assume if it existed in real life, it will be constructed using conventional methods and traditional materials like Hollow Blocks and On-Site fabricated Concrete Pillars with Steel Bars embedded inside. Just for kicks with a bit of help from a structural engineer made possible by the persuading powers of Starbucks latte, I ported his model to an in-house software (secret!… shhhh!!!), assigned materials and properties and embedded steel bars close to how it would have been if it is real life. It totally collapsed on a Magnitude 5 Earthquake… (I’ll post screenshot of it when I get the chance to retrieve it). Disregarding structural integrity, the building is a Death-Trap during fires.

Ehem… At this point I already had enough fun and lulz and sufficient mental exercise. In return, I decided to volunteer myself and give them a far better model they can use to create their BG for Café Memoria.

Slowly but steadily, the building is starting to take it’s shape… I must admit that I’m having a little too much fun with it…

Since I’ve gone this far, might as well go ballistic and all out and model everything inside… from scratch (meaning: I’m not using anything from 3D warehouse… only Original Uncle Mugen Models)

Not satisfied with just the Cafe, I also added outside detailing so we can have nice reflections on the windows and stuff in the main building.

Wanting to stretch the amount of fun I can get with the model, I made nice mockups… with Uncle Mugen! Nice!

Of course, all good things come to an end and I’ll eventually hand over the model back to “thebackup” and his team so they can proceed with completing the VN / OELVN… and with just the interior furnishing missing… allow me the pleasure of showing this test render of the current progress (play in HD for maximum satisfaction)…