When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect. I was often studying floor-plans and drawings, drawing my own and learning. Then I discovered computers and became a programmer instead. But I’m still interested in architecture.
Last year I began to learn 3D-modeling because I wanted to mod and build stuff for FlightGear (an open-source flight simulator). This water tower is one of the buildings I’ve made as low-poly versions for FlightGear. But I wanted to do a more realistic version because I think it’s such a cool building, and this is it.
The real water tower is located in Kalmar, Sweden. When it was built in the 70’s until mid 80’s it had a restaurant at the top, but nowadays it’s not possible to enter as a normal person, so I had to work based on photos and drone-videos found on the net. The internals (the little that’s visible) are basically an educated guess, and the measurements (except when publicly known) is mostly approximated from photos.
There are lots of antennas on the tower which haven’t made yet, and I might try to build the environment surrounding it. (The HDRI used in the render is “sunrise”, which is distributed with Blender, licensed as CC0.)
These are some of the challenges I had as a newbie.
The stairs are not going in circular shape, but built as two parts of a hexagon with landings between them (at least what I can glance from photos, not entirely sure of the details). So there was a lot of fine-tuning, and I have still not gotten the sides to match up. Also there is a bunch of array-modifiers used in different ways which were a pain to match up.
The water tank is externally round but has a hexagonal stairwell going thru it as well as a 12-sided building on top. Since I wanted to use the subdivision surface modifier I had some trouble making these inner shapes. Eventually with some strategically placed creases it panned out pretty good.
I found out the hard way that lights cannot be arrayed. But a post on stackexchange said that you can use instancing on vertices, parent the light to the vertex, and then array the vertices. After some trial and error I managed to work it out.
