Gothic Cathedral

#61

Exactly right! Joining up the sections is difficult! With gothic architecture I can kind of hide these dodgy joins with detailed pillars and archwork. There’s no blueprints for these buildings as they didn’t make blueprints at the time! Form my reading, most of the measurements were kept in the master mason’s head and draw in a clay surface to show the other masons whilst building. I have a great many books on gothic architecture which I use and I’ve visited lots of cathedrals and taken thousands of reference photos. The tower I’m currently working on is almost an exact copy of the one at Reims. The nave is a mix of different cathedrals, mostly Southwark cathedral in London. The crossing is from Ely Cathedral. The chapter house is a mix too.

Poly count is a few million each for the tower, nave, crossing, chapter house and transepts. There’s no meshsmoothing anywhere, so that’s just the repeated details. All the segments are just repeated instances too. There’s a lot of symmetry too which saves a lot of time.

#62

Sealing up the gaps in the tower:

#63

Some more update at last! THis is the chapter house at the far end of the cathedral. I’ve started texturing. Any feedback welcome. (I know the lighting’s terrible :shrug: )

#64

Wow I didn’t know if you’d bring off the texturing to match up to the modeling but that’s some fine texture work on that lower arcade along the wall.

What an enjoyable project to follow this has been. :bowdown:

#65

Thanks! :beer:

Here’s an update on the ceiling texturing (click for full size). It’s just the base surface at the moment, there’s some decoration to add.

#66

Oh man, this is going to be great!!!

I am preparing to model the basilica of Vezelay for a personal project. It seems that I’m going to use splines, sweep and loft nurbs for the ceilings.
Do you have a specific workflow that you discovered works best here?

I am going to keep an eye on this one.

Good luck, Robert

#67

Thanks Robert!

My workflow is pretty similar to yours- lots of lofts and splines! I’ve got a huge amount of reference in books that help a lot too. Symmetry modifiers help too. I’d be interested to know what your plan is for statues and other carvings? I’m struggling to figure out how to cover that as I’m not great at sculpting such things. I thought about 3d scanning on site but haven’t found a great way to do it that way.

#68

Hello Hugh thanks for answering,

Yes I’m gathering references as well, luckily there are some floorplans and even measurements on wiki about this vezelay basilica, and a photobook that I ordered is supposed to arrive any day now. So soon I will slowly start (i am not in a hurry, first I need to finish some other models) for it.

I have the same considerations about all sorts of smaller details especially the capitals.
Not sure yet,but in my case I might simply go for normal maps, because in probably all of the shots they will not be close anyway if at all visible. I’m planning to make the whole structure but leave out everything else that will not be visible.

Anyway I’'m still considering doing some 3D scans, after doing some brief searching I found THIS, together with a Xtion camera it might do the trick. Maybe also FaceShift will be useful here, but I’m not sure.

Hope you will post here if you decide to use any of scanning solutions.

Take care, Robert

#69

I was thinking of using a hand-held scanner like this , hooked up to a microsoft surface tablet to make it easy to carry around, but that makes it quite an expensive solution! That software you link to looks interesting! I might give it a try and see what I can come up with.

#70

I remember seeing that dandy scanner a while ago, its the iphone under the scanners isn’t it.
Indeed a little expensive, and one off the nice things of the kinects and friends is that you can use it with many other applications.

Regards, Robert

ps, still curious on how it will perform compared to the non-hand scanner.

#71

Nice good looking textures!!
Congrats!

#72

very impressive model

#73

Long time, no update. Having trouble getting the lighting right with all the stained glass!

#74

this is great :slight_smile: i love it

#75

I hope you haven’t abandoned this project. I’d love to see more… :bounce:

#76

Hey thanks for the encouragement! I’m finding it hard to get any time to work on it, so it is “on ice” at the moment, but I will be returning to it soon! Always great to read that people are interested though, thanks! :beer:

#77

Hello Thidman,

Wow, that looks great! :surprised

I don’t know if it has been said, and maybe it’s obvious, but did you think about adding some ambient occlusion to the textures or in post-production via render passes?

I personally think the base of the walls, the part that is in a light grey stone, could benefit really well from some dirt or a black gradient going upwards from the ground.

I would try the same for the red niches in the wall. I think it could maybe give some more definition to the forms.

Again: impressive work!