Maya - Tower


Tower


Our assignment was to model a tower. After a considerable amount of thought I decided that I would not do a simple water tower or a modern tower, I would go for a mystic and magic style of tower. My idea was to combine all world magic with maybe mystical slightly futuristic elements. I therefore planned to make the body of the tower in the older style and have a projection from the base of the tower going up inside towards the magical elements above the tower.

I started modelling the roof as this would give me the size of most of the other elements. It was also the most time consuming to get the tiling correct. The tiles were difficult to organise because they had to be angled and shaped correctly to be able to place the next layer above and also to be able to place them around in a circle as the centre portion of the tower had to be smaller than the outer part of the tile.

This involved several attempts at "Duplicate Special" with different angles and shapes before I found the correct combination to achieve success. This was then repeated on the succeeding layers of the tiles. I then placed the rings and hoops on top of the tiles to complete the roof, again using duplicate special to ensure they were arranged at perfect angles and positions.

After the roof, I used a torus and some cylinders to create the mid part, then shaped some cubes using Boolean for the archways, which completed most of the mid lower parts. The stairs were created using polygon pipe, cutting out one segment and using duplicate special on that.

For the lighting I created a cylindrical cone shaped projector with a recess in the middle in which I placed a spotlight with a very narrow angle to send a focused beam of light through the middle of the structure. At the top I placed a sphere for the spotlight to shine upon and using the flattened trusses surrounded the sphere, something like Saturn's rings.

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