#002 The Gates of God Metropolis

As I was searching what fantasy element I could model for my portfolio, I couldn’t help but think about the fantasy universe I (and some friends (mostly my friends Franck and David)) have been creating over the years; with such a vast world, it might seem easy to pick out one element to model, yet I was stuck wondering what I should build. After some though, the obvious struck me: why not start with the beginning? The first thing I could think of was the gates before the bridge leading to the God Metropolis, the city where the gods live.

The first step was to grab some reference, so I googled some images of city gates from medieval towns and old constructions, this got my mind going so that I could sketch up some concept art (figure 2); I found my design instantly (I could of elaborated some more and explored some more designs, but I’m a big fan of staying somewhat resembling the original designs (figure 1 will show you the original design of the gate I had designed some years ago for my Zorglon and Co. comic) so I decided I’d go with the first concept; also, it pictured all the elements I wanted in it.

Figure 1

Figure 2

The next day I moved on to modeling and got it pretty much all done in a few hours’ work, which I found myself pretty proud of (figure 3). I tried unwrapping with Unfold 3D Magic but only to find it crashing on me 10 edges away from the mesh cutting; although it would of been quicker to just start over, I decided against it because if it crashed again, it would’ve been quicker to just unwrap everything manually; plus, I could use the unwrap practice (unwrap=my weakness).

Figure 3

Today I was able to pretty much finish unwrapping (still reworking some elements as I add the textures) and begin texturing, I’m hoping to have almost all the textures done by tomorrow. Until then, have a glorious day.

UPDATE

So I finished the project after three days of work (which could have been condensed in two days if I had sat down from morning to evening working on this. Nice pace, I’m proud of the end result.

I hit a snag near the end; I had originally planned to have all of the gods’ flags up on the wall...thing is, the gods have a very wide palette of colors, making each one unique...also making the wall look like some carnival clown; oh I had all of them hanging there with their brown and purple and pink and green, it was sickening (have a look in figure 4, those are my concept arts for the flags). Luckily for me, the main gate of God Metropolis brings people to the Zorglonite and Rawdakian neighbourhoods, whose colors happen to be blue and red, just like the roofing on the gate, this suited me quite well; I decided that the flags on the walls of the gate would only represent the god’s whose neighbourhood was across the bridge instead of all the gods (it also makes more sense).

Figure 4

The following images show you the end result. Enjoy and feel free to comment.