ARTS 3890 Project 3

In keeping with what I had said in previous projects, where the themes were Los Angeles and Minneapolis (places I have lived), the theme for this project was to be South Korea (where I might live someday.)

I had initially planned to do a 3D model of Sungnyemun, Seoul’s southern gate. But since I ran out of time to do a proper model of that, and the assignment turned out to be doing a collection of related objects, I decided to reproduce an inspiring monument.

Technical limitations have prevented this final render from looking cooler. It’s still very cool though.

Screenshot of the final scene within Rhino 7 (3D modeling software).

Reference photo for the overview scene.

This is May 18th National Cemetery in Gwangju, South Korea. In 1979, South Korea’s dictator was assassinated, and in 1980 a student protest against his successor, demanding democratic reforms, expanded into a citizens’ movement that was brutally suppressed by the government. This event is known as the Gwangju Uprising, and the citizens who were gunned down by their own government are honored here. The rows of things you see behind the monument are graves.

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Now for the components of this scene:

Monument Gate

I find that textures looked better if I blew up the objects to a larger scale. I was going to scale up the final scene at the end, but computer limitations prevented that.

Gate reference photo

Lamps

Lamps reference photo (best one I could find)

Graves

I made two gravestone designs. Using an ellipsoid for the grave itself and lopping off the sides looked unnatural, so I tried drawing a series of arches and creating a loft between them, which resulted in the design on the right. Simply flattening the original ellipsoid, however, made it look natural enough and closer to the reference photo, resulting in the design on the left which is what I went with.

My original gravestone render (here you can see improved texturing from using a larger scale.)

Reference photo for the graves.

Monument

Several different monuments were made, of varying completeness and thicknesses.

One reference photo, that shows thickness and part of the beams through the center.

I also made some steps for the graves to sit on, as in the reference photo, and a grassy patch at the top of them. This can be seen in my final render, at the beginning of this post.

Challenges

The final scene became too unwieldy for my aging MacBook laptop to handle, so I transferred the project to my desktop PC, which has more RAM. However, due to severe supply shortages, I still only have a lackluster $50 graphics card for my PC, and so it chugged along trying to edit anything, and I gave up on scaling up my final scene and adding more to it. Obviously there is more I could do for this project, but I learned a lot using Rhino for this.

Also!

Because I was running low on time to make something that would be 3D-printed, I made a chocolate kiss shape for that purpose. I was at least proud of myself for discovering the “Chamfer” command within Rhino and using it successfully to round out the bottom of my “kiss” and produce a more natural shape.

My 3D prints! One large, one tiny.