Week 8

The next week I continued my technical drawing of the interior plan and completed it by adding measurements for nearly all details of the space including the width of the four pillars and two doorways leading into the room and outside into the balcony. Since the plan of this space had its walls sitting at an angle on two ends I even gave the measurements of the width of those walls separate from the overall room itself.

completed Plan of my interior on Sketchup

making the flower shape based on my hand drawn designs

After completing the plan I began my elevations which was the most time consuming part of the drawing because of the nature of the design itself that was stylized to represent Mughal architecture. The jaali window pattern was not very simple to create and took a few good attempts to look closest to my free hand drawing of the design I made on procreate.

first attempt at jaali window pattern

After a single flower was made came to part of creating the pattern of the window itself and this was the tricky part because I didn’t fully understand the spacing required between each flower to accurately fit the window frame and happily ended up adding far too many and overcrowding it to the point it looked like a nightmare to model out of.

adding dimensions to the finished elevations

The second phase of creating the elevations were the pillars. They consisted of two separate designs but it was mostly the top half of my designs that differed but held interconnecting elements in both which made it simpler to duplicate and add. I had to make adjustments to the height of this from my drawings I made earlier that were smaller to the final technical which came up to a height of 9 feet 8 inches for all walls and pillars touching the tip of the domed ceiling in the room.

detailing in the pillar design

The two pillars had detailing of space for mirror-work to be added in my model when I texture it. The small circular pattern carved into the elevations were the mirrors that are a common Rajasthani element in jewellery and interiors that represent royalty.

completed pillar elevation

The tops of the first pillars are that of a lotus which is a common architectural feature in India and as a story point to Othello is meant to represent Desdamona’s purity at heart taken away from Othello as a flower which floats above the surface of the water and as a symbol water represents the violent current of his hatred that consumes her.

completed door elevation

The last elevation I made this week was of the doorways. This wasn’t overly complex by design and took a bit of trial and error to get the arc tool to give the desired effect which I adjusted later by ungrouping the line or object. After the door I made the three steps below it and duplicated this for the second set on the adjacent wall.

Blender Model

After completing my technical drawing I moved onto 3D modelling the set in Blender. I naturally began with the most complicated structure being the windows and started the flower pattern. I was able to create the shape and corrected my errors on the technical drawing by spacing out the pattern this time and extending the dividers between each flower to allow for more room and simpler placement which made the overall design pleasing to the eye and improved the build in general, I was able to go back into my Technical drawing and change this there based on the model of this in Blender by drawing over an image of this.

modelling the flower pattern

completed jaali window model

After creating a single jaali window I duplicated it twice to get my two other walls and adjusted the angle of it by placing it directly over an image plane of my technical drawing and using the measure tool on Blender to check the dimensions of the height. Following this I placed four blocks to stand as the pillars on the Plan view to check the alignment of everything before modelling since symmetry was an important part of the design.

placing the windows above the picture plane of the plan view

arranging blocks for the placement of the pillars

modelling the first pillar

Both pillars were fairly straightforward in the approach to model and I was careful to not group all objects together to avoid a texture being placed over the entire entity when I wanted to separate them in layers instead by having the top and bottom halves separate objects and the mirror work its own component as well.

after the modifier was applied to the lotus top

all four completed pillars

To create the curved top structures of the first designs which were shaped like lotus flowers I had to apply a Boolean modifier to achieve the desired effect by placing cylinders on the edges of the curves that were hidden in my viewport and renders. After modelling the four pillars I moved onto the step platforms curved around the entire space which raised the windows and allowed for the water to not overflow outside by creating depth.

facing the pillars placed into position

the doors in material view

The final two structures to model and build were the two doors that I created by modelling one face of the door frame then duplicating and flipping it to join the backside of it and then grouping to make one whole door frame. I followed the same principal of grouping design elements of the door separately so they could be textured as different objects and not one whole. After placing everything in the space I added the four walls around the windows on the opposite end and this completed the first phase of the build.

aerial view of the model in object mode