For the concept of this project all I wanted to do was make a castle that was in SPACE. So, from my imagination, I wanted to just let my creativity have a go at using rhino, and came up with this. At this point my cartoonish creation barely resembles a castle but hey a base is also a castle. The model started to look cartoony straight from the get go so I decided to roll with it and keep up the cartoon space ship aesthetic.
Process:
The process was slow, and because of my models angled shape it was difficult to use the polar array command to speed up the process as a whole. For now, I'll start at the beginning. Since the main aspect of this project was to utilize basic shapes and combine them to get more complex geometries, most of the modelling done with my castle ship was done through placing and scaling basic shapes, to make more complex ones. for example, the central tower was made with a topless cone, then I mirrored it and scaled it down, all while using control points to make sure the base of the two shapes was even allowing them to be BOOLEAN UNIONED together. I applied this principle as I worked down to make the body of the ship, repeating the process and rescaling as I went to form the hull and central tower. next, I used control point curves and the loft command to make the oddly shaped wings of the vessel. However, what's a mothership without armaments? with the body of the vessel solidified, I began constructing the weapons by combining an array of basic shapes like cylinders, torus', cones, spheres, and cubes. I made these components at different sizes and put them together like you would a model car to make some cool weapon systems for the ship. I took this a step further and implemented the same method for the shields and energy systems; copying and pasting objects along the way to give the ship the symmetry that all world ending motherships have. However, I felt as if I wasn't demonstrating enough core skill, and knew that for the secondary turret towers, detail needed to be added to them using the polar array command. It was very easy to use the polar array command on a circular base such as the cones that were the ceiling of these secondary towers to give them cool detail, as well as windows to the shaft of the tower itself. feeling bold at this point, I used the polar array command to add windows to the hull of the ship. However, Since the hull is a polygonal shape, the windows pathed around to their relative positions in the preview circle, but each window then had to be manually turned and rotated to get it to fit and look natural on the angular sides of the ships hull.
Materials:
in the final rendering phase of the project, I found myself sticking to a lot of metallic textures that were provided in the rhino rendering/materials engine, as well as some glass for the windows and energy projections. I did this to start to maximize on the space ship characteristic of m project, as all the small details on the exterior of the castle ship had only kept me focused on the cartoon aesthetic. One problem I found with the rhino rendering software was that it was impossible to get good lighting to have my metallic materials shine properly. in fact, the lighting seemed to be static and the shine was in a preset place based on my perspective viewing location. All in all, I was ha with the way that m cartoony space castle turned out, looking like something straight out of "invader zim".
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