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Using My Reference Images
Using My Reference Images
To start off, I wanted to make sure that the central image of Arcite in the temple was the main focus. At the same time, I wanted to look towards a real historical temple of mars that was built. Pictured below is one such temple that was constructed in the Forum of Augustus to commemorate Augustus's victory in the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE. It should also be noted that in the same forum was also a Temple to Venus which makes it a very similar to the location depicted in The Knight's Tale.
To that end, I started off in an effort to blend the two references for my work.
In game Construction
In game Construction
The biggest part of the building process was the constant process of iterating to make the temple closer and closer to what I wanted the end product to look like. Above you can see my changing the blocks around to better depict the materials that would have been used in a temple. All of the initial blocks I chose were very arbitrary. I just wanted to get the right silhouette at first. Fortunately, Minecraft has a lot of built in commands that allow you to change large groups of blocks at a time for whenever you're ready to move on to the more decorative stages.
The first major change I did to the exterior was add a large and somewhat dense cluster of dead tress to match the descriptions on lines 1975-1982 referencing how the temple stood in a forest filled with gnarled and old trees. The temple stands strong above it, seemingly defying the nature of it's locations. It also helps the temple not feel like it's just sitting out of place, giving the whole location a little more depth.
To match the Roman temple, I made sure to make a large middle staircase flanked by two statues and have the large collumns that support the entire structure wrap around it.
The first iteration of the door didn't sit right with me so I went in and borrowed the description saying that the door was made of burnished steel. The door was also narrow and frightening to look upon so I added some additional decorations in an effort to hopefully intimidate any who would attempt to enter.
I also didn't forget about the northern lights, that will come up in the final photos though.
The initial ceiling seemed to be too high. The descriptions in the section gave a more claustrophobic feeling. That Arcite was standing directly at the feet of Mars and subject to the brutal nature of his surroundings. This can also be seen in the Kelmscott picture, where it's almost like Arcite is lightly hunched over just to fit within the frame.
Redesigning this roof to be shorter and flatter was probably the second biggest modification I made to my initial designs.
When I finished my first iteration of the floor and interior, there were a lot of blues and other cool colors. To better match Chaucer's descriptions, I removed all of the blues and replaced it with reds and yellows. It's almost as if the floor is on fire to match the feelings of death and war that surrounded Arcite during his communion with the god of war. In blender, I would further enhance this by adding additional lightning effects.
The statue was a big detail that I made sure to not miss. I tried to match Mars's pose in the Kelmscott picture with him holding his sword above his head and his shield at his side. The wolf is also present here, sitting down at Mars's left. I unfortunately wasn't able to recreate the dying body, more on that in the difficutlies section.
Preparing for Blender
Preparing for Blender
The tool pictured here is called Mineways. It's a simple tool that does one job, take Minecraft worlds and export them into formats that can be opened and edited by other software. In this case, it allowed me to take the temple and export it as a .obj filed which can be directly imported into Blender. It was very convenient because without it, I would've been forced to recreate everything from scratch in blender, which would effectively be double the work.
Using Blender
Using Blender
When importing to Blender, the first thing I noticed was that there wasn't any background to the chunk of the world that I imported. To combat this, I created a mini almost lightbox-like structure to give a good environment for me to take my photos in. Luckily, I wasn't constrained by phyiscal form due to have a virtual camera. This allowed me to adjust and move the dimensions of the lightbox as needed to accomodate for whatever photos I needed to take.
I would've preferred to create a more realistic surrounding area, but found that I didn't have the time to really incorporate and anything I did would've come out worse than just using this box. So, unfortunately, I ended up just settling with a box that was filled in with a neutral color to contrast nicely with whatever lights I added.
Finished Product
Finished Product
Exterior
Exterior
The first thing I really took advantage of with Blender comes through with the use of more advanced lighting. Lighting is a really subtle tool that allows you to make pictures look way better with not too much effort. Here I bathed the exterior of the temple in sunset lighting which puts the temple's environment closer to the time in which Arcite prays to Mars. Additionally, I was able to add the nice blues, greens, and yellows of the northern light which are said to shine from within the doors of the temple.
Interior
Interior
Here is where I really began to enhance the views with lighting. I put a subtle red and orange glow across the floor and the statue. It has a very "evil villian's lair" look that I think contributes very nicely to the general feel of Chaucer's work. That is also part of why I kept the room very dark. It would help the softer lights really shine through and better matches the time of day that this scene occurs.
Difficulties and Discoveries
Difficulties and Discoveries
Difficulties
Difficulties
As someone with zero background experience in Blender, it was definitely very hard. I have had some experience with 3d mapping tools like Unreal Engine and Hammer, but this was a completely different landscape. A lot of the same ideas were present, but the toolbelt was foreign to me. A good analogy for it would be if you asked a pianist to play the trumpet. They would certainly be able to recognize the notes, but getting to them on a trumpet is completely different than getting to them on a piano. Not to mention the need to blow air through the instrument to generate the sound. This was the situation I was in trying to get all of these pictures.
Although Minecraft has a very versatile building system, there are only so many things you can do with cubes. This is especially noticeable when looking at the statues. They all have vague shapes that resemble what they're supposed to be, but I can't really do a face on a 1x1 block space. It is possible to achieve that fidelity by just using more blocks. That's how pixels on a monitor work, but getting to that level of detail by scaling up would be very impractical for the time that I had to finish this project. Another solution would have been to sculpt the models in blender itself as it has the tools for it, but then they would potentially just stand out too much from the blocky background and give the scene a very inconsistent feeling.
I will talk more about this as a positive in discoveries, but there is a huge number of online tutorials and videos that teach people the basics of the things I used. Unfortunately, I did run into some tutorials that were for outdated versions of blender which led me on some wild goose chases down menus that didn't exist anymore.
Discoveries
Discoveries
Something that I still can't quite believe throughout my time working on this was just that everything I used to create all of this was free. Blender was free, Mineways was Free, Google sites which I used to make this was also free. Ironically, the only part of this project that wasn't free was Minecraft.
Even though I brought it up as a difficulty, the online communities sorrounding everything I used proved to be more valuable than disruptive. Any questions or confusion I had was either already answered by someone else through a video or tutorial post. In the case there was something I didn't know, I recieved answers very quickly, sometimes in minutes. Everyone I met or talked to proved to be very welcoming and open in ensuring that I was never lost at any point in this process.
Colors really do matter in the visual process. Something that is hard to really understand unless you really see it. Take the before and after picture of the temple floors for example. They feel like almost completely different places despite the only change being a shift in colors. It's a cool thing that I never really learned about regarding color theories and visual arts, but it's something I will definitely be paying more attention to in future projects.
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