Soot

Last week I took myself on a trip to Kent and Sussex as I felt the need to collect photos of various aspects of the areas i’m looking at Bodiam. As I was making such a long journey I decided to roll it together with a trip to . I viewed the visit as a trip to have a look at how spaces were laid out and filled during the period and to use it as a possible basis for how I will begin to decorate my finished rooms despite being both Royal and of an earlier date.

The rooms themselves are fantastic, richly coloured and filled with beautiful pieces of furniture. I suppose I always had the idea that rooms were always white based on how many are presented now and how they are pictured in books and other reconstructions.

The Great Tower at Dover Castle

The other thing I noticed which hadn’t appeared (in my memory) in a lot of images was the presence of lots of soot above all of the fireplaces. At Bodiam the fireplaces, open to the elements, have all been washed clean. Whilst at other properties I suspect many of them are kept clean as part of the daily conservation tasks, or no longer have fires burning. It made me think this is something I need to remember to include, as a lot of models produced are often too clean and don’t accuratley represent the nature of life and buildings when they are being lived in.

Soot above the fireplace at Dover Castle

Starting over

After having a play around today I came to the conclusion (which I had i think decided on a while ago) to restart. My reasons for doing this are that as I have gone along I have realised that errors with the shapes of the walls were going to cause me a lot of trouble later on with rendering and a lot of what I had done had been hacked together a bit as I had gone on to just make it work. The final realisation was that I realised that the reason I was having issues lining up the survey data with my walls was because I had forgotten the walls are not straight! This has come from me remembering (albiet a bit late) that the way medieval ceilings/ floors are constructed is based on *balancing* the edges of beams on an overhang. the following image shows the east elevation and the more mossy strips of masonry show where the line of bricks at the top of each floor before the wall falls back.

So I have started from scratch again to make sure I include this. I started by importing the survey data again but this time grouping it all together and moving it to (0,0,0) as well as aligning it to the grid. This should make future modelling easier than it has been as x,y,z now should be moving either along, into or up the walls of the elevation. I next imported the wall file I had used before which was constructed of basic shapes such as extruded rectangles to create the space of the rooms. I deleted all but the main rectangle as I decided until I had lined everything up and generated the right shape for this basic space there was no need to try and create the tower rooms as they would probably need editting at a later point anyway. I then shrank the wall down to just the basement level. I then created a copy of this shape by selecting and moving along the x axis, than had to just extend it to the right position. I then selected the polygon of the wall and moved this backward to make the wall thinner and generate the step on which the floor would stand. I did this again to create the 2nd floor. This has solved all the problems I was having trying to line up the window guidelines on different levels.

I am now going to start modelling the window on the lower floor. I think this time I will try a slightly different method for creating the right shape as I realised the method I was using wasn’t generating the most even shape.

Hello world

This first blog post I will use to quickly fill in the gaps of what I’ve said I’m aiming to do and what I’ve actually done.

I have been playing around with starting a blog for a while and I must admit it is more for me to keep track of what I’m doing and how I’m doing it than for anyone else. I think my aim is to keep my digital ideas categorized separately so those with a lot more experience can quickly skip over the pain staking things and only read the (hopefully) interesting results or ideas of what I’m doing.

So to begin I am about to embark on my first project of modelling the private chambers at Bodiam Castle. These can be seen in this image (thanks to Prof. Matthew Johnson for the photo)

To start on this I took part in a two week field season in April 2011. I worked with Penny Copeland, James Miles, Pete Wheeler and the Arch2024 students to produce the east elevation of the castle using a total station connected to AutoCAD using TheoLT.

This completed elevation I proceeded to import into 3ds max. I will be using the survey data as a guide to shape my model of the rooms. I am currently exploring different methods of building up the shape of the rooms (the position of the walls and their heights). I have tried using lines to draw around the edges and am also experimenting using Standard primitives and using them to create Pro-Boolean objects. I am also trying to begin to cut holes into these completed walls as I think this will help determine which option is better suited.

I have also been thinking about the issues associated with the data. The survey data is incredibly detailed because of this I am having a hard time making decisions about how closely I should follow it and also how to interpret a number of the lines. This has led to lots of discussion with Alice Watterson (http://digitaldirtvirtualpasts.wordpress.com/) about the process of reconstruction and how we can bridge the gap between our observation of the site today in the present, and our visualisation of the past. It has also led to me questioning how I can fill in the gaps of my data (where walls no longer exist) and how I can build this uncertainty into my visualizations.