Castle - The Winter Palace

 

For this assignment, I looked at the architecture of the Baroque period. I tried to Model after The Winter Palace, Located in St. Petersburg, Russia. I chose this building for two reasons. The first one is that I thought the highly repetitive style of the baroque period represented an exciting challenge that I wanted to take on. The second reason that I chose this building is simply that I am very fond of the baroque architecture style. I s find the style to be quite beautiful with its bright colours and simple building shape, which emphasizes the complex decorative inlays. When people think of 'castles,' they likely think of Victorian or Gothic style Architecture. The Winter Palace, with its baroque style, is a building that I find very unique and one that I was pretty excited to work on.

The shape that I used the most was the rectangle. The Baroque style is very square in building shape and has several rectangular windows. The circle tool was used primarily for the decorative inlays over the windows and the little balconies. The Polyline tool created the pillars for the railings and the railing itself. The unique tool that I used the most was likely the BooleanDifference tool. All windows and doors are cut into the side of the building and not just built on top of it, so the boolean difference tool was used to create all of these shapes. All the decorative pieces were used by cutting different into the basic shapes and then using BooleanUnion to combine them. 

One of my biggest successes with this project was the idea I had to build the building in modules instead of one large piece (image #6 shows the individual pieces I made that created the whole). Creating this castle in Rhino would have likely taken double the amount of time if I had chosen to build it as one big piece instead of three separate sections. Choosing to build it in this fashion gave me room to make mistakes without worrying about ruining the whole building. My original plan was to only produce the front of the castle. Choosing to build it modularly gave me the option to add that back section of the building. One of the greatest struggles I had with this project was navigating around Rhino. I have previous experience in 3D Modelling (In Maya) and while some of the tools between the two software are similar, moving around in space is incredibly different. The Hotkeys, viewports, and commands are all quite different. I often found myself trying to use navigation tools from Maya and applying them in Rhino. Even the Gumball tool in Rhino is slightly different in Maya so making this adjustment was a bit difficult for me. This wound up chewing up a lot of time when I was trying to create my model and is still something I struggle a bit with.