Inspiration

This personal work was created specifically for the Evermotion competition 2011. The digital artist could choose any interior space that inspired him. The main aim was for it to be photoreal.

I chose the architecture university where I've been studying for six years. For a long time I wanted to create the path that goes from the street to the end of the building complex, which is the library itself. Because of time constraints I couldn't model everything so I focused on a short part of that same path.

Inspired by Michelangelo, the original architect Siza created a difficult path that leads you up ramps, down stairs and through almost labyrinth-like routes until you reach the end of the complex: the library. It is, in my opinion, the perfect place to read, mainly because the shadow is so soft and doesn't interfere with your reading. There is great geometry, fine details and a remarkable sense of scale in this space.

The goal of my work was to respect Siza's architectural concept, simplicity, materials, light and design, and obviously make it look hyper-realistic.

Modeling

This part of the article covers the modeling of the museum space. For the floor, ramp and near wall I modeled simple boxes with the desired dimensions, around 1m x 50cm (Fig.01 – 02). Although it seems like the floor is one big object it is not. It's composed of different pieces (elements) separated by 5mm. This is very important because at the end of all this modeling I wanted to give each element a different ID – using the Unique Material plugin. Once the basic model was done, I applied a checker material with 2,0 tiling in order to know how well it was distributed after using the RailClone Pro plugin. In the end, I changed the checker material to a marble, which you will see in the texturing section.




I then created two splines, one for the floor and the other for the ramp. This determines their path when using the RailClone Pro plugin (Fig.03).