Randall Villegas: Week1 Castle

Design- I went through a few iterations of castles before I settled on an Indian Style palace. The Taj Mahal is one of my favorite buildings so I took great inspiration from its design. I really wanted to add another layer of hierarchy the Taj Mahal doesn't have with the addition of the wings on either side of the center piece. I kept the original pillars on the corners of the supporting base, but added guiding pillars to the building and a grandiose staircase. The colors palette is earth toned to give it a desert feel.

Overall Shot

Techniques- I used the curve tool to create a basic outline for the onion domes and revolve tool to make a solid. The openings were created using the curve and line tool, extruding to a preferred thickness, and finally used Boolean difference to cut out the holes.  For the base of the building, I used the line tool to create an outline and extruded to a reasonable height, Simple truncated cones were used for the pillars with cylinders creating the rings around them. The design for the ornaments on top of the domes are a combination of spheres and revolved curves that were stacked until something interesting appeared. I put a large effort into using grid-snapping to keep consistent scaling throughout the model and to develop a more realistic model. I mostly worked with half, or less, and used the mirror tool to make perfect symmetry on the model.

Ghosted Shot

Materials- I use a white marble for the large forms of the building, material used in the Taj Mahal, that I adjusted to give a sandy colored look and a granite material with color adjustments to add an earth colored detail to the structure.

Pedestrian view

Centered Shot