3D Modelling & Animation – Week 09

3D Modelling & Animation – Week 09

Inspiration

After the relative ease of dealing with the dice last week, I looked at some architectural ideas for my modelling project. I have always been a fan of minimalist design, and the seemingly simple, geometric shapes of minimalist architecture sounded like a perfect direction for my project: simple, but if done well, very effective.

A couple of great architects I came across via ISO50 were Tom Kundig and Jamie Darnell. Not only are these fantastic examples of minimalist design, but the lighting in a couple of the shots really caught my eye. Lighting seems to be something that can make or break a CG model, and a carefully considered lighting design, coupled with some clean, minimalist lines could be a good move.

An architecture student friend of mine then suggested that I take a look at the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. It pretty much ticks all the boxes: great design, check; simple but quirky character, check; it’s in Japan, check… it’s all there really. Sold.

nakagintower1
Image: archiCentral

Work

The obvious place to start was with the capsules. To save myself a lot of work, I’ll be duplicating them until the cows come home…

capsule
One capsule

…it’s not a flying start, but I’m on my way.

As pointed out in the tutorial, a narrative is fairly important for this project. We won’t be doing an animation – just modelling and render – for this work, so the image really should be saying something. And a building doesn’t say a whole lot without some context. So I have decided to use my idea of strong lighting and set the image up at night.

Ideally, I would like to create some of the buildings surrounding the Nakagin Tower (but to a lesser detail) and have a few of the lights on inside these skyscrapers. Instead of people inhabiting the buildings though, I would like to see silhouettes of people standing on top of the Tower and the surrounding structures. With some eerie night lighting, this could set up a kind of dialogue that whilst fairly abstract, could hopefully spark a bit of conversation.



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