The idea is to have a bunch of these “side towers” with one part of it bending down under its own weight and being held up by ropes/sticks. A contrast between the magical and mysterious tower and the very common folk way of dealing with the bending tower problem.
I wanted to try out node tools, so I created a tool that makes a side tower and attaches it in the place of the selected vertex. It has some options for tower size, rotation etc. Also it randomly chooses from a selection of roofs:
Was it more efficient than just copying and attaching towers manually? No. Was it fun? Yes!
I can just see the poor long-suffering engineers working for an eccentric wizard, trying to keep the whole thing stable:
Like so >>>
– Sam, terrible news! He just requested another addition for the Western 3-C!
– That’s…! That’s fine, we’ve been preparing for this. New modifications to N-2-D and E-5-A will balance the whole thing out. Probably.
– He wants to put the new alchemy lab in there! Remember the last time? I admit, the twelve-legged sheep was not the worst thing we saw and girls down at the farm made good money from all that wool… But we still haven’t found Bertie!
– Well, that’s not entirely true. We believe, we’ve found his nest in Storage Tower 4.
– He’s a pig, Sam! They are not supposed to nest. Or breathe fire for that matter.
Thanks, everyone! @stray , great write up, catches the feel I was going for perfectly
I’m reading about composition and Gestalt theory and wanted to try and apply it. So, it is important that the main point of the piece (the bent tower) stands out. It already does, since it is the exception to everything being vertical. I did try to emphasize it by spamming a bunch more regular towers. But I think it made it look too cluttered:
The bent tower makes the object asymmetrical. I wondered how it would look if I tried adding symmetry with another object that just happened to have mirrored layout to the bent tower. Rough layout like this:
Not sure if I like it. Perhaps with a well made tree it could look more subtle. Also a tree with leaves could partially occlude that little upside down tower, making it a hidden Easter egg in the final image?
Looks amazing, I love the quirkiness of the project, looking forward to seeing more, also you should change your title photo thing IDK what to call it to your “wip-006” photo, because it is more visually apealing
Thanks, Julian! Can’t take much credit for the rope, the technique is straight from a tutorial.
Naturally, the wizard prefers to work inside the bent tower, leaving the rest of them unused. But it is quite a steep bridge to cross to get into it, so he needs a railing.
Most tutorials I’ve seen on modelling say to add a subdivision modifier and then add supporting edge loops where you want non-rounded geometry.
I was about to do this on my tower, but then thought “why”? I’ve been modelling without subdivision surface so far, just using “Shade Auto Smooth”. I think it looks fine? Here’s example topology:
There are subtle shading issues here and there that I haven’t been able to fix. Is that because I didn’t subdivide the mesh?
I’ve tried googling this, but honestly I’m at the level where I don’t know enough to figure out how to find relevant trustworthy information. A lot of videos talk about what to do when making models for games and animation. But this will only be used for pretty pictures.
Is my modelling approach bad somehow? Does this approach without using subdivision modifier have a name? What is “SubD modelling” (does it just mean applying the subdivision modifier)? Where can I find such very fundamental information?
Keep in mind, while the goal is to make this look good in renders, I also enjoy “learning the craft”, so I’m not after the “do whatever works for you!” answer.
What you’re doing is fine. Modelling without sub-div using shade auto smooth gives good results within Blender renders, which is your goal. Where it doesn’t work well is exporting or 3D printing, because shade auto smooth is just a Blender trick. If you’re not exporting to other programs or 3D printing, you don’t need to worry about it unless you want to
Modelling has been painfully sloooooooow. I’ve spent 28 and a half hours inside this blender file now. Will I crack a hundred before I’m done? 50, for sure.
Spent a lot of time fixing weird shading here and there due to bad topology. Made main entrance with door and staircase and a bunch of windows.
I like the quirkiness of your design, looking forward to where it goes!
