Chairs and Benches

To add more detail to the castle and some clutter, I decided to make some chairs, tables, lamps, benches for the courtyard and an altar for the monastery. These were all very simple to make, requiring few shapes and the one that took the most time was the chair because of the small details. I based the chair off of the following picture, and created the rest of the objects without a reference.

I started the chair with the seat using the box tool. I cut out half of the shape and applied a symmetry modifier, making the process slightly easier. The symmetry modifier is definately one of the most useful tools I've learned to use in this program. Once I had the box, I pushed and pulled vertasis around the corners to smoothen them slightly. I also made a dip in the top of the seat using the same method. Once this was done, I made the legs out of boxes and after converting them to editable polys, used the scale and rotate tool on the lines to get the correct shape. This was the hardest part of the chair as it took a while to get the details correct. Finally, the top bit of the chair is made out of more boxes and the shape is obtained again from pushing and pulling the vertasis.

Once I had the chair done, it was a matter of resizing and scaling the nessecary shapes to get the bench and no extra shapes were added to it.

 

The next thing to do was the table, which was the easiest. 5 boxes in the shape of a table top and legs, and rotate the legs slightly so they don't go straight down. Once everything in place, attach everything together and you have a table. I applied a mahogony texture to all of the objects, as it looks like a nice high quality wood and fits well within the scene.

The altar was the next easiest as I had made the flags beforehand and had experience using the cloth modifier. The altar itself is just a big box, and the cloth that lays on top is a white plane which stretches and drops down over the altar once the object properties are set and after simulating local. as this didn't require any animation, I simulated it until it was in a nice position and left it there.

The lamp was the hardest to make, as I didn't have much of an idea of how it would look. I started with a box and used the sphere modifier to make it into a ball. I then cut off the top and bottom of the shape and started extruding it up and outwards. Once I had the shape, I applied a texture to the bottom of the lamp and a glass texture to the top so you could see the light shining through. Unfortunately, when I actually put a source of light inside the lamp it wouldn't spread to the outside, even though the material opacity was down quite alot. Because of this, I found it to be good to add an additional omni light on top of the lamp that adds a glow that looks like it's coming from the lamp.