Logopolis & Castrovalva: Wandering the corridors of the TARDIS

[MttElby]

Some mood lighting in the corridor outside the cloister room:


In the end, I decided to go with the screen-authentic broken/incomplete version of the columns, so that's the main update:


I'm leaning more now to doing a purer Logopolis TARDIS (with the Logopolis console room), then a pure Castrovalva TARDIS, and (if Blender/my computer can handle it) later merging the two together as a post-Castrovalva TARDIS.

[MttElby]

Lack of updates for a while due to being on holiday and then having a very frustrating time trying to finish the cloister room bench. Having the photos of the original bench, showing more detail in the sculpting, actually makes it harder to work out how to replicate it. I also had to start again with the bench top after it developed some weird shading errors that wouldn't go away.

Current state, still missing the leaves on the front of the legs:


To ease the mental paralysis with the bench, I added a bed to Romana's room, just to check a standard size single bed would fit and not be hit by the door.

 I'll need to add some more of her possessions, because it looks too much like a cell at the moment! These will include the sofa unit, the metal-and-glass shelving unit and the white hatstand, plus some pictures on the walls. I'll have a go at the folding tree screen thing too. I've ordered the season 18 Blu-ray, which should arrive today, so that will give me a better look at her stuff in both Full circle and Logopolis.

[MttElby]

Right after I posted the last image, I noticed from the set plans that the wall wasn't quite right around the door to Romana's room, so I had to correct that. At the same time I added a pillow to the bed and the glass-and-chrome shelving unit, which already makes it look less like a cell.


Having just watched the Making of documentary for Logopolis, there are five new behind-the-scenes shots of the cloister room, including one that clearly shows the broken ends of the arches, and much better views of the paving on the floor, so while it would have been nice to know about them before doing the modelling, at least I can now match mine to the real one more closely.

[MttElby]

A quick update. Romana now has a painting on the wall.

[MttElby]

Having found some production photos of Romana's room on the Full Circle Blu-ray, which showed the full height of the chrome-and-glass shelving (and some other angles), I realized I hadn't got it quite right, so had to redo it. At least now it looks way better, like flat glass shelving, rather than an array of lenses.


I've also added another painting to the wall (from Full Circle), altered the bed and pillows a bit, and added the bit of sofa that is seen in Logopolis, which ends up looking a bit like a toilet in this view.

I think I'll do the hatstand next, although like everything else it's not as straightforward as I first thought, as the hatstands aren't all the same. Romana's one isn't just the one in the console room painted white, and the one seen in Castrovalva is different again.

[MttElby]

A slightly different view, of a slightly fuller room. The door has been removed to show more of the interior.


As well as the hatstand, I was able to fit all of the sofa units seen in Full Circle into the Logopolis version of Romana's room. I might have to remove the isolated seat on the left to make room for the circular table with the purple tablecloth, but either way it will be much more complete set of contents than what is shown in Logopolis, without visually contradicting it.

After the table is done and in place, it will be the folding tree stand next, which being flat is easy to fit in (if not create).

[MttElby]

A few more chattels for Romana's room.

I think the circular rug may be a bit too big at the moment, but you never see the whole thing at once in Full Circle, so it's hard to tell.

[MttElby]

Another view as it wasn't very clear in the previous render that there were objects on the table, namely a glass vase and a photo frame (of K9).

[MttElby]

After putting it off because I couldn't work out the real colours, I finally added the pattern to the third cushion.

This image shows the dilemma:

On the left is how the cushion looks in behind the scenes photos, and on the right is how it looks in the episode.  It's understandable that different lighting will give different colours, but what is the real colour of the central diamond? Is it a dark red, or a light pink? The other colours look different between them too, but not by as much.

I've gone with a more screen-faithful version of the colours of the pattern, but with the more coppery version of the main cushion fabric:

[MttElby]

Something a bit different. After updating the paving stone pattern in the cloister room, I decided to have a play with "Plant factory" since one of its tree types is similar to the trees in the cloister room.


I'm also now thinking about using Blender's Ivygen to generate some ivy too, since that's the dominant form of life in the cloister room.

[MttElby]

Back to Blender frustrations today.

After assembling all the images I had of the folding tree stand, I was able to work out how it was structured (a single 3-piece object, rather than two 2-piece objects as I had first thought) and create the three parts in Inkscape:



That went smoothly and I saved the three parts as separate .svg files for loading into Blender, but Blender didn't like them, with bits disappearing or inverting when I imported them. They load fine into every bit of SVG software I've tried, but not Blender. Trying a few online cleaners and optimizers didn't solve the problem, so it looks like I'm going to have to redraw them all over again directly in Blender...

One interesting discovery in this process was that the behind-the-scenes photos for Logopolis are vertically cropped on the Blu-ray version compared to the DVD, meaning the top of the trees was cut off on the Blu-ray images. Fortunately, I took screengrabs from the DVD first, as that image does show the tops.

[MttElby]

Phew, didn't need to redraw them all after all, just locate one overlapping vertex in each piece and then they sorted themselves out.

It was a squeeze, but here's the tree-stand in situ:

The low sample size makes them look like they're melting, but otherwise another tick off the list.

[MttElby]

A different render, without the denoising algorithm (which seems to be convinced that the trees are actually clouds so keeps making them smeared and fuzzy).



Not many changes here. I crumpled up Romana's hat a bit and moved the sofa seats and hatstand around to better match the screenshots, but it's mostly to show the tree stand better.

[Volpone]

Talk about making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.  That room completely fails practically at being someone's room in every respect (there isn't even a closet), but you've managed to, without significantly changing the dimensions, make it credibly a room someone would sleep in. 

[MttElby]

Talk about making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.  That room completely fails practically at being someone's room in every respect (there isn't even a closet), but you've managed to, without significantly changing the dimensions, make it credibly a room someone would sleep in. 

It becomes clear when trying to work out how the TARDIS fits together that there are a bunch of everyday issues (Where do they eat? Where are the toilets?) that set designers seem to think are too mundane to take into account on a time machine - or not worth spending the extra money on. Yes, you can just assume there is a communal bathroom somewhere on the TARDIS, that is never seen simply because the story should be about more dramatic and interesting things than that, but as soon as something is presented as a bedroom, it does need some basic stuff in it.

It can be argued that TARDISs were supposed to be short-term travel vehicles for gathering artifacts from across the universe, not places that Timelords lived in, but even so, if you're going to fill a room with shelving units and tables, why not a cupboard or chest-of-drawers too?

Although wardrobes do exist on the TARDIS (we see one in the console room in Androids of Tara), all the bedrooms we see only have stands and racks for clothing. There's nothing for putting underwear in.

In my version of Romana's room, the roundels on the back wall have cavities behind them (like the medicine roundel we see in Castrovalva) for smaller clothing items, and open like the one we see Turlough access in Terminus. Once all the furniture is in place, these would be pretty awkward to get at - but that's Romana's problem.

Without wanting to invent too much non-canon stuff, I have tried to take into account things like plumbing and ventilation with my version of the TARDIS interior, while still not contradicting anything actually seen on camera. I can't come up with a good in-universe reason why Nyssa would do scientific experiments in her bedroom, rather than a dedicated laboratory, though...