Akhil Mulukutla: Week 1 Castle

Project 1

 Akhil Mulukutla 

ATCM 2355.001

 

 

 

CONCEPT

                                                                         Reference image. 

 

    My concept is a modern castle aesthetic with sharp lines and geometric shapes. I decided to include a village to create more of a sense of community while also emphasizing the size of the main castle structure. A majority of the build is made up of rectangular prisms while a few cylinders and cones were also used. The main castle itself is built up of rectangular prisms throughout with many smaller prisms making up the ornamentation. I used the reference image of the gray castle above as most of my inspiration when creating the main castle. The 4 smaller towers coming off of the main tower was something I had never seen before and I incorporated that into my own design. The L shape of the surrounding wall was also used in determining the shape of my own surrounding wall.

 

 

 MODELING TECHNIQUES

    The techniques I used involved many rectangular prisms. I started by building the outside wall with the cube tool and continued around with a few more prisms. I then added as many details as I could from the outer wall towers to the trees and booths within. I chamfered all the edges I could as I knew my final composition would be made of a translucent material and would look far better with various edges. Besides the shape tools I also used arrays to create the patterned edges found on the top of wall towers. I created one of every asset including the small houses, big houses and trees and used ALT to duplicate them throughout the castle walls in a pattern that seems realistic. The castle itself seems symmetrical but actually isn't as the building connecting the two main towers is slightly offset for design purposes. This layout posed many challenges as I couldn't use the mirror command often but the ALT key worked just as well in duplicating my assets as well as ornamentation.

MATERIALS

    I wanted to use a translucent material for the project as I had seen it used in one of the examples in class. The example reminded me of a chess set that I have with glass pieces and a marble board so I wanted to recreate that look in sculpture form. The idea of a desktop glass castle sculpture intrigued me so I jumped into Keyshot with that idea in mind. I had originally created a base for my castle in Rhino so I went ahead and made that a deep maroon solid so that the castle would contrast well on it. As for the entirety of the castle (including the various assets), I used a glass texture with a blue tint. This was to extenuate the transparency of the glass as much as possible while still giving it a rigid and sharp structure. Overall I chose these colors and texture to give the castle the same luxurious look as the chess set.