"Northbury" is the name of a house that sat on the West Arm of Michigan's Walloon Lake for nearly fifty years. In 19__, after having rented a house on Lake Grove Road for a few summer vacations, Arthur and Anna Thornbury decided to purchase a nearby cottage. Only a few years later, while the cottage was unattended during the winter, its gas furnace malfunctioned and burned the entire structure to the ground.
Arthur and Anna then hired Petoskey architect John M Wooden to design a new house to replace the one they'd lost. Unfortunately, Arthur suffered a heart attack while construction was underway and never got to see the finished house. However, Anna, her five children, ten grandchildren and others enjoyed many summers on the lake as well as more than a few winters on the nearby ski slopes. In 2010, the house was sold and within a few years it was replaced with a new structure.
As one of Anna and Arthur's grandchildren who visited Northbury regularly for forty years, I've undertaken to build a virtual recreation of the house and surrounding landscape. Modeling is being done with Blender. World creation and rendering is in Unreal Engine. The map is 64 square miles (8 x 8) and encompasses all of Walloon Lake. My goal is to recreate the house and world as it existed when I visited as a child around the end of the 1970s, mainly with period-specific furniture but also roads and landscape features as they existed at that time.
Project
"Northbury" is the name of a house that sat on the West Arm of Michigan's Walloon Lake for nearly fifty years. In 19__, after having rented a house on Lake Grove Road for a few summer vacations, Arthur and Anna Thornbury decided to purchase a nearby cottage. Only a few years later, while the cottage was unattended during the winter, its gas furnace malfunctioned and burned the entire structure to the ground.
Arthur and Anna then hired Petoskey architect John M Wooden to design a new house to replace the one they'd lost. Unfortunately, Arthur suffered a heart attack while construction was underway and never got to see the finished house. However, Anna, her five children, ten grandchildren and others enjoyed many summers on the lake as well as more than a few winters on the nearby ski slopes. In 2010, the house was sold and within a few years it was replaced with a new structure.
As one of Anna and Arthur's grandchildren who visited Northbury regularly for forty years, I've undertaken to build a virtual recreation of the house and surrounding landscape. Modeling is being done with Blender. World creation and rendering is in Unreal Engine. The map is 64 square miles (8 x 8) and encompasses all of Walloon Lake. My goal is to recreate the house and world as it existed when I visited as a child around the end of the 1970s, mainly with period-specific furniture but also roads and landscape features as they existed at that time.