Logopolis & Castrovalva: Wandering the corridors of the TARDIS

[Volpone]

The roundels on the door also look a lot bigger.  I wonder if the table and rack in the foreground are a lot closer to the door than you have them.  Back when "Friends" was on the air I always used to say it was fishy that fairly young people would have such huge apartments in downtown Manhattan.  Then one day I got to do the Warner Brothers studio tour and they took us to the "Friends" sets.  The actual sets are tiny.  For whatever reason they look a lot bigger on TV.  I know you painstakingly put all this together from plans but I wonder if, when they did this shot, they didn't actually use that much of the room--they put all the furniture right near the door so they would get a much tighter shot on the actors. 

[MttElby]

The roundels on the door also look a lot bigger.  I wonder if the table and rack in the foreground are a lot closer to the door than you have them.

The rack is right up against the wall and I'm fairly confident that it was on the set too. I notice the chrome supports look a bit thin, though, so I'll beef them up a bit.

With the table, because it's out of focus in the screengrab I was thinking it was near the back of the room and being shot over. I kept moving the table closer to the door to try to get better match, but it's certainly possible that when they staged the shot it was actually blocking entry into the room.

The larger looking door roundel is also hard to replicate/explain, and roundel sizes are about the only component I'm sure about the size for. I'm left thinking it was some telephoto lens trick, flattening the scene, but that doesn't help with deciding what to do about it. It would be nice to know if there's a setting in Blender that would change the "lens" of the viewer to make it suddenly look correct. I know you can change the focal point and depth of field of the camera used for rendering, but that's a very slow way to test things out.

In a way it's a non-issue because when virtually walking around in Romana's room it would be impossible to see that view from that position as I had to remove the side wall to get that view.  The actual set solved that problem by never having side walls in the first place .

Fortunately, I still have a hairbrush and some metal flower/loop things to do before I've finished with the table objects, so I can put off worrying about the position of the table for a bit.

[Rassilons Rod]

I always thought that about the door roundels (and the one under the scanner in Season 14) - but they seem to be the same as all of the ones in the walls.

[MttElby]

A few more bits and bobs for Romana's room, including the fancy coathanger I'll need to put her clothes on the hatstand.

[MttElby]

Adric's alcove:



There is a handle on the door, I just chose a bad angle.

[Rassilons Rod]

So much 80's goodness in this project!

I always loved that door frame ☺️

[MttElby]

So much 80's goodness in this project!

I always loved that door frame ☺️

I may be getting better at this, because that was the least frustrating bit I've done so far!

Here's another view, from the console room doorway.

The scary black void is where the Logopolis corridors will eventually start from.

[Rassilons Rod]

I may be getting better at this, because that was the least frustrating bit I've done so far!

It's looking great!

[MttElby]

After doing mostly low-sample renders for speed, I thought I'd finally do a slow, high-sample render to see if it brings out more detail in the roundels and perhaps most importantly, gives sharp edges to the columns, rather than them looking like they're melting.


Good to see it worked, but I'm still not happy with the texturing on the roundels.

[Rassilons Rod]

How are you doing the texturing on the roundels?

A couple of ways to consider:

1) One big texture for a whole wall of roundes (or maybe 2 or 3, for extra randomness). You can always move the UVs some of them around the textureso there's less repetition. (This is probably the option I would use).

2) Using a procedural texture.

[MttElby]

How are you doing the texturing on the roundels?

A couple of ways to consider:

1) One big texture for a whole wall of roundes (or maybe 2 or 3, for extra randomness). You can always move the UVs some of them around the textureso there's less repetition. (This is probably the option I would use).

2) Using a procedural texture.

At the moment it's a procedural noise texture (Musgrave) applied to arrays of roundels, which spreads out the pattern across them, rather than them all having the same pattern (although the first full roundel in each column will have the same pattern with this approach). I've just not been able to find the right settings to give small fuzzy patches. I either get small sharp patches, or large fuzzy ones, neither of which look quite right. I've so far avoided UV unwrapping the roundels as there is so much fine detail that the the UVs will look like the output of a paper shredder!

[MttElby]

I went back to the Romana doorway situation and played around a bit more with placement, angles and camera focal length. This is the best I can get it:


And here's the comparison:


I still can't get the roundels looking as big as in the screengrab, but everything else is basically correct, without having to put the table in a weird position in the room (although it is elevated off the floor). I have to conclude there's camera trickery going on that I don't understand.

[MttElby]

I've been a bit delayed by a monitor dying and waiting for a replacement to arrive, but as it's bigger I've noticed some details that weren't so clear before, about the vertical bars (radiators?) you see on the walls in the corridors near the cloister room.

The first observation was that there are actually two different sets, and the second was that the bars are recessed, not simply attached to the wall and sticking out like I had done before.

Here's the two types in a single wall:


Not the most exciting of updates, but the set designers clearly thought they were an important addition, whatever their function is supposed to be.

[MttElby]

Another comparison with screengrabs, this time the corridor with the "radiator" next to Romana's room.


This took lots of rearranging of the existing walls to get a match, so I wish I had done the alignment before cutting the holes in the walls for the radiator bars, as changing them afterwards is a real pain.

[Volpone]

It looks to me almost like fluorescent light tubes.