| | | Jeff Underwood | | Final Scene | | | The Iron Throne | |
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| | Inspiration
This piece is based on the book “A game of thrones” by George RR Martin. For hundreds of years the Targaryens ruled the Seven Kingdoms, supported by fire-breathing dragons, but the dragons slowly and mysteriously died, and finally the madness of King Aerys forced the other powerful families of the Seven Kingdoms to take up arms against him. An alliance between the Baratheons, Starks, and Lannisters won the war that followed, but the people involved paid a grievous cost. The book begins about fifteen years after the civil war. Robert Baratheon is still king, but the crown sits heavy on his brow. “The Hand of the King” has been murdered, and with nobody else he can trust, King Robert once again turns to Eddard Stark for help. All this happens when winter is drawing close after a summer that has lasted more than a decade. Long summers are normally followed by even longer winters, and this time the omens speak of a winter the likes of which has not been seen for thousands of years… maybe long and cold enough to wake the terror that lurks beyond the Great Wall, the northern border of the kingdom. The scene I have chosen takes place at the start of the book. King Robert has just left to ask Eddard Stark to take up the powerful position of “The Hand” and the Iron Throne sits cold and empty…
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| | | Objects | Throne room | Jeff | | | Carpet | Jeff | | | Steps | Jeff | | | Candelabra | Jeff | | | Windows | Jeff | | | Tapestries | Jeff | | | Roberts Hammer | Jeff | | | | | | | | | | Textures | Brick, wood, stone | http://www.astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/texture | | | Procedurals | Jeff | | | Metals | Lightwave | | Stained glass images | http://www.infomotions.com/gallery/indianapolis/Pages/33.shtml |
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| | Problems and Solutions
This scene started out much differently than the final product. I had originally planned on doing an outdoor scene of the character Jon Snows’ perspective as he is being chased by the “Wildlings”. It turns out that snow is incredibly difficult to reproduce realistically. I tried many, many different solutions, but nothing was coming even remotely close to what I wanted. I tried gradient layers, but they look very artificial for close up shots, and I needed to have footsteps in the snow, so that (combined with several attempts at shadow maps) didn’t work. I then tried making actual snow bank objects and that was a nightmare. The poly count rose exponentially as I added more “snow” so that was unfeasible too. Eventually I scrapped the scene and started over with a scene that I have much more control over. The work on this scene went quickly and smoothly and was done over an entire weekend of non stop modeling. The lesson here… don’t assume you can do something without doing a google search to see if there are any good tutorials. Im going to go sleep now.
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| | Time Frame
Well if you have read my problems/solutions section you know that I spent most of my time on the first version of the scene. In all I spent at least eight lab periods on the snow scene. The entire final scene was done over the course of one weekend and took around 25 hours with around 4 more hours worth of tweaking done over the last few days before the project was due.
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| | References
Well I would put the “snow” references I used here, but they were worthless.
I did find several tutorials from the class web page useful:
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