Tately Diep : Week 1 Castle

 

Concept: 

I was inspired by the Summer Palace, which is found in Beijing, China. It is located within the largest royal garden in the world, “Garden of Restful Peace.” I admire the notable characteristics of Chinese-styled architecture, like the upturned roofing and bilateral symmetry. I tried to mimic the traditional structure of a pagoda by creating a tower with multiple tiers with roofs that eave.

Summer Palace Imperial Garden

Techniques: 

While making my castle, I heavily utilized the mirror tool to make everything evenly symmetrical. To create the upturned roofing, I drew a curve and used the ArrayCrv command to duplicate the tubbed shape to frame each tier. The top roofing was challenging at first to emulate the upturned umbrella shape. However, I then ran the PlanarSrf command to create the unique curves found in many Chinese-styled pagodas. A lot of scaling was also used throughout the building process of this model in order to maintain balance and consistency.

Ghosted View

KeyShot Layer Assignment

Naked Edges

Materials: 

When choosing materials, I wanted to replicate the model as much as I could to a real Chinese palace. For the roofing, I went with a ceramic finish as it was the most common material used for ancient Chinese roofing. I chose green roof as it was a common color used for the roofing, as it had represented youth and longevity. As for the body of the castle, I used red concrete, as red was also a commonly used color used in Chinese architecture as it represented the color of good fortune and luck. I implemented yellow-colored wood framing for the windows and door as it was a color that was associated with royalty, more specifically, the emperor. As for the other details, the windows I used white paper to mimic the traditional paper screens, and for the pillars, I decided to go with a glossy red paint to replicate the red lacquer that was used to coat wood as it was a general practice used as a decorative protectant. Lastly, the foundation of the castle was made of stone tiles to represent the superiority that upper-class buildings had and were typically built on.

Standard View

Birds Eye View

Pedestrian View