Lym's TARDIS (and Met Box) Renders

[Angelus Lupus]

Yup, perspective, lens distortion, focal length.. and that's without considering that you are trying to match to an image that's been scanned - even something as simple as the photo not laying flat on the scanner could introduce distortion! It's enough to give one a headache, full credit (and admiration) to everyone who manages to get useful measurement from this technique!

[lym]

You know, during my searches for information on Met Boxes, I felt there was definitely a missing piece. Sure, the Mark 4s were installed around World War II, and the Mark 5s around 1953 - but surely that couldn't have been the end of it, right?

Wrong. On the 1st of April this year, I took it upon myself to visit my local library and asked - no, demanded - some books about London police history. Sure enough, I was in luck! I flicked through the pages and spotted some minor useless information (such as the official confirmation that hundreds of Met Boxes were actually installed in Greenland) and came upon some new information.

There was a short run of boxes that actually succeeded the Mark 5s, first commissioned in November of 1963 due to an unexplained interest in police boxes. This, however, was shortly before the time that children had been spotted shouting "exterminate" at the police boxes, which the Met took as a protest against them, leading in their eventual destruction to appease those children's wishes.

These new boxes were described as "simplified" and "modern", and were allegedly made out of 100% concrete. Apparently the Met had found the Mark 5s too complex in design to keep commissioning, and thus agreed on this new ergonomic design.

So, without further ado...

I present to you...

For the first time ever...

Unseen by anyone before today...

The Mark 6 Metropolitan Police Box.

Spoiler

Aren't I so funny? 

[close]

[Cardinal Hordriss]

I can see the USSR utilizing that design.

[tony farrell]

Well, Tony was absolutely right about the difficulty of matching photos to the models. There's just so many variables that need to be right (perspective, focal length, box angle, etc.) that it's almost impossible to get right. Case in point:



Both these photos are of the exact same box (V47), and they both use the exact same model. You can see just how wildly different a slight perspective mismatch can make. I eventually gave up trying to match it to the second one since it definitely wasn't gonna work any time soon.

Well Lym, the first thing to say is don't give up at the first hurdle!

The second thing to say is - and I don't mean this disrespectfully - don't assume your model is correct.

Thirdly, don't assume that 'received wisdom' is correct either. (I've laboured for the last five years or so under the assumption that everyone was correct in stating that the sign-boxes on the Brachacki Tardis were 5.25 inches tall. As Slava and I have now discovered, they were five inches tall - that's a big difference.) In the case of the Met Boxes for 'received wisdom', read the Met Box plans which are available.

So, just as what has gone before for the Brachacki Box has - up to now - coloured my judgement, what has gone before is inevitably colouring yours (again, I mean no disrespect). Thus, be prepared to adjust your model to fit the photographs and not the other way round.

Now, everyone seems to be 'focussing' on focal length. Well, yes, it does have an effect - if I've got this right, the shorter the focal length, the greater the perceived distortion will be; the nearest points of the subject will appear closer whilst its furthest points will appear to be more distant so, if you stick a camera up close to someone's face, their nose will appear much bigger than it is in reality and the back of their head will appear smaller than it actually is. The result being a distortion of reality .....

But, is focal length really going to distort the perceived dimensions of what is - in essence - a square box without that distortion being blatantly obvious to the observer? Well, actually, no it's not. You might end up being out by a couple of percentage points on a particular dimension but not much more.

In order to even-out this couple of percentage points of distortion, you ideally need multiple photos of the same object and here Slava and I have the advantage - we have many photos of the Brachacki Tardis from a multitude of different angles whereas, you are stuck with one or two photos of the same Met Box. So, inevitably, what you're going to have to do is repeat the exercise of overlaying a wire frame diagram onto multiple boxes and take the average results.

If it's any consolation, your wire frames don't appear to be very far out - the box you've created is a tad narrow, your corner-posts are a bit too wide and the sign-boxes are a little too tall but, with a bit of persistence you should be able to achieve a much closer match.

Because you don't have the source materials at your disposal, you might never achieve perfection but - as the Romans used to say - "perfection is for the gods"! 

T

[galacticprobe]

One thing I noticed with the box on the left, is that the wire frame is really very close to the actual box; but the base will be difficult to match with the wire frame because the box's base is on a slope (downward from left to right in the photo). The wire frame for that will never match up at ground level.

So as Tony says, don't let things like that throw you. Keep at it. (And as Tony quoted the Romans with regard to perfection, keeping in the same vein there is the saying "Rome wasn't built in a day".

Dino.

[lym]

Update time! Here's some new wireframe overlays.



Starting to get somewhere now. Definitely not a perfect match yet, though, although you can't exactly get perfect when the boxes all have subtle differences. It's probably best to try and create an idealised plan made by averaging out all the quirks of each box as there's just so many variables to take into account. Since the last update, I've made the box less narrow, moved the windows up and made them a little taller, and completely redone the pillars to make them more rounded (NOTE: The image on the right was actually done before the rework of the pillars, hence why they don't match as well as the one on the left). I've also made the phone door window a little smaller and the main door handle a bit bigger.

[lym]

I also tried using a HDR environment map for the first time:

[mverta]

That's a step up, huh?

One thing you're fighting now is the unrealistically shallow depth-of-field - your TARDIS is now a miniature.  The depth-of-field of an average lens at that focal length, shooting an object that size from that distance is quite large.  To get accurate renders from virtual cameras, you have to mimic real cameras.  Generally speaking, the longer the lens, the shorter the depth of field, but the size of the object and camera's distance from it is key.  Shoot a bottle of water with a 100mm lens and you'll get the effect we see in your render, but the only way to get this actual depth-of-field look on a real Police Box would be to use a tilt-shift lens, which is a wild effect.  You can see photos of things like the Colosseum shot with a tilt-shift where it looks like it's about 1 inch big.  But that's not what you're after!

One other tip for adjusting materials when using HDRI's - make a black-and-white version of it to use when adjusting colors because otherwise the colors in the map will distort the look of the colors on your object!

[dw_1200]

One other tip for adjusting materials when using HDRI's - make a black-and-white version of it to use when adjusting colors because otherwise the colors in the map will distort the look of the colors on your object!

You sir, are a genius :0
Such a simple but clever solution to some of my problems too...

[lym]

I'm having a lot of fun with this.



I didn't actually realise how prominent I made the concrete texturing on the Mark 2 until I saw it in natural light, poor thing looks like it has scars. That will be fixed shortly.

And of course, just for fun:

[lym]

At last! We finally have evidence that met boxes were, in fact, installed in Antarctica. 

[Rassilons Rod]

I guess there werent many left by the 80s according to Logopolis and The Tenth Planet

[lym]

Just received a new image from NASA - wow! Looks like met boxes were installed on the moon too! Truly there is no limit to the expanse of these boxes.

[peted]

I'm having a lot of fun with this.



I didn't actually realise how prominent I made the concrete texturing on the Mark 2 until I saw it in natural light, poor thing looks like it has scars. That will be fixed shortly.

And of course, just for fun:

The black and white ones are really convincing. I actually did a double take when I saw the preview!

[lym]

Two worlds collide!


And in black and white: