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Wandering the corridors of the TARDIS: Castrovalva

Volpone said:
And, like me, he thought of the designs from the perspective of doing a 2D picture of a 3D object instead of actually building the object in 3 dimensions.
Click to expand...
The shortcuts of 2D work, like layering objects, are definitely missed when doing 3D modelling, with a simple example being the blue back of the wheelchair:
WC.jpg
In 2D it's just a blue square over which you place two unfilled rounded rectangles with darker blue outlines. In 3D, because it can be viewed from any angle, the two rounded rectangles need to be part of the larger blue square, because they are indents in it. This would be easy if they were all rounded, but as I've discovered today, much harder when the outer one is sharp-edged.

Anyway, this is where I'm at, much later than expected....
WCback.jpg
 
Making progress with the wheelchair.
Castrovalva73.jpg
The idea is to do one half and then get Blender to auto-generate the other side. Unfortunately, it's not completely symmetrical, but it's easier to do the different bits afterwards. So far, despite the somewhat fuzzy reference screenshots, this hasn't been as aggravating as other complex objects I've done, although I will end up having to guess what some bits actually look like.

Interestingly, the wheelchair used in the location scenes (like you can see above) is slightly different to the one used in the studio. This shouldn't be a surprise in the world of Dr Who props, but fortunately since I'm only doing the TARDIS interior scenes, I don't have to worry about which one is more correct, and can just go with the studio version.:D
 
Nearly done with the wheelchair:
Castrovalva75.jpg
I just need to do the bits connecting the front wheels to the frame, which are a nasty mix of curved and straight sections. I need to get these right because the wheels are going to have to rotate as the wheelchair moves (on its own) and that's a type of animation I've not tried before.

I thought I'd try a quick render too:
Castrovalva76.jpg
No colours or textures yet, but it's nice to see how much more real it looks, just with some shadows.
 
I've moved on to the bird's-eye view animations, which means the updates will slow down as I have to wait for them to finish rendering. The trip to the zero room uses over 5000 frames, so it's going to take a while...

Here's the start, with the 5th Doctor tying the end of his scarf to the door handle:
Castrovalva79.jpg
Blender has already tried to sabotage it by deleting the objects that leave "footprint" trails when I saved the file, so when the render finishes I may discover that there are no trails at all. :mad:
 
As suspected, no trails were visible when the render had finished, but since I left it running while I went away on holiday, no real time was wasted. I got to see a few glitches that need fixing - most notably the Dr's hat is pink because of a lost texture - so it would have needed some re-rendering anyway.

I didn't want to junk it, so I've uploaded this version to Rumble, for anyone with 3:33 to spare:

Best watched in full-screen of course.
 
I had an idea that rather than coloured dots, the trail left by the characters could be smaller versions of their heads:
Castrovalva80.jpg
This will make each trail more distinctive (important as there will be lots of crossing trails), but could end up looking very weird.:unsure:
 
I've started the animation rendering again, so fingers-crossed.
Before doing that, I did quite a bit of tinkering, the main thing being an expansion of the sickbay room (the one the wheelchair rolls out of).
It struck me as a bit small for a proper sick bay (although big enough for one bed), so I extended the room backwards so that there could be specialized areas for different kinds of treatment, and it ended up having the shape of a cross, which seemed very appropriate for a medical room. It might seem odd that Timelords would have a cross as the symbol for medicine too, but the medical roundel we see in the show has a red cross on it, so a cross-shaped sickbay is in keeping with that. Anyway, here it is:
Castrovalva81.jpg
It won't show up in the Castrovalva animations, so I haven't put anything other than the wheelchair in there.

After getting carried away with that, I was adding some more walls to the top edge of the map and that turned into a gym/workout room near the cricket pavilion. I don't imagine the Dr has a bunch of weight machines or dumb-bells, but I can see the third Doctor having a large mat for practising Venusian aikido on.
Castrovalva82.jpg
I'm half thinking that the long thin room at the top could be for cricket nets. Presumably, it was also the third Doctor who was the cricket fan, as it's hard to imagine the first or second playing it.
 
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MttElby said:
I've started the animation rendering again, so fingers-crossed.
Before doing that, I did quite a bit of tinkering, the main thing being an expansion of the sickbay room (the one the wheelchair rolls out of).
It struck me as a bit small for a proper sick bay (although big enough for one bed), so I extended the room backwards so that there could be specialized areas for different kinds of treatment, and it ended up having the shape of a cross, which seemed very appropriate for a medical room. It might seem odd that Timelords would have a cross as the symbol for medicine too, but the medical roundel we see in the show has a red cross on it, so a cross-shaped sickbay is in keeping with that. Anyway, here it is:
View attachment 777342
It won't show up in the Castrovalva animations, so I haven't put anything other than the wheelchair in there.

After getting carried away with that, I was adding some more walls to the top edge of the map and that turned into a gym/workout room near the cricket pavilion. I don't imagine the Dr has a bunch of weight machines or dumb-bells, but I can see the third Doctor having a large mat for practising Venusian aikido on.
View attachment 777343
I'm half thinking that the long thin room at the top could be for cricket nets. Presumably, it was also the third Doctor who was the cricket fan, as it's hard to imagine the first or second playing it.
Click to expand...
The fourth Doctor also bowled a rock in the quarry, in Seeds of Doom 😊
 
Just want to point out, there were some instances of texture clipping/z-fighting in the top-down view of the Doctor's route through the corridors, usually between the walls and the connecting pillars.

Aside from that, beautiful work so far.
 
baltowolf99 said:
Just want to point out, there were some instances of texture clipping/z-fighting in the top-down view of the Doctor's route through the corridors, usually between the walls and the connecting pillars.

Aside from that, beautiful work so far.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's unfortunately one of the irritations of Blender. It used to deal with Z-fighting by colouring the overlaps in white - which blended in because the walls are white(ish). When it changed to showing them in black instead, I had to start fixing them. The problem is they don't show up until you do the proper render and it isn't predictable where they will be. They should be everywhere in theory, because all the walls and columns are the same height, but in practice it only occurs occasionally.

I think I squashed them all before starting the re-render, but there's no guarantee new ones won't appear this time...
 
MttElby said:
Yeah, that's unfortunately one of the irritations of Blender. It used to deal with Z-fighting by colouring the overlaps in white - which blended in because the walls are white(ish). When it changed to showing them in black instead, I had to start fixing them. The problem is they don't show up until you do the proper render and it isn't predictable where they will be. They should be everywhere in theory, because all the walls and columns are the same height, but in practice it only occurs occasionally.

I think I squashed them all before starting the re-render, but there's no guarantee new ones won't appear this time...
Click to expand...
That is true.
Although, I think using the Rendered Viewport Shading can help you find most of them.
 
baltowolf99 said:
That is true.
Although, I think using the Rendered Viewport Shading can help you find most of them.
Click to expand...
I wish it was that straightforward, but the viewport rendering isn't the same as a the final render in various ways (especially for lighting). I've just had a quick look for black patches and as well as not matching what the final render shows, it changes according to what is visible in the viewport.

Here's a shot (in the viewport) showing some of the black overlaps:
Z1.jpg

But when I bring in the floor object, they disappear for some reason.
Z2.jpg
They aren't there in the final render either.

With hindsight, I would have made sure all the columns and walls were imperceptibly vertically offset from each other when I did the original template set, to avoid any Z clashing, but at this stage it would take ages to do that. The good news is that each frame of these bird's-eye-view animations only takes 6 seconds to render, so redoing any that show Z-clashing isn't too time consuming.
 
I've now done the bird's-eye-view animations for both the Nyssa/Tegan journey to the Zero Room and the Dr's return to the console room from the Zero Room.

For the Dr's return I've decided to centre the camera on the wheelchair, rather than the Dr, which made things more complicated, but a bit more interesting visually. Blender kept changing the height of the wheelchair for no good reason, so after a few corridor turns it would be floating off the ground above the walls. No idea why.

Here's the start of the animation...
Castrovalva83.jpg

...and here's the end (without the Dr's trail):
Castrovalva84.jpg
Still need to render all the frames in-between of course!

I'm not going to do the BEV of Nyssa or Tegan returning to the console room as they take the same route and it's almost the same as the Dr's route.
 
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