|
|
 |
|
| |
| The Hanging Gardens of Babylon |
 |
Historical Notes
The fabled Hanging Gardens are definitely one of the more well known Wonders to us today, and yet in terms of archaeological record, they are the most mysterious and most poorly documented. So little is known about them that all we can really say is that we know something fabulous existed, but we know nothing of exactly what that "something" looked like. So my design is purely speculative, more intent on conveying a feeling of enchantment than historical fact.
What we do know about the Hanging Gardens is that they were commissioned by Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of Babylon (modern day Iraq) to please his queen Amytis of Persia (modern day Iran). His queen came from the beautiful mountainous highlands of northern Persia, and was believed to be greatly unimpressed with the bland desert landscape of Babylon on the Euphrates river. She was homesick for the towering landscapes of her home, and the fabled Hanging Gardens were specifically built with towering structures and many terraced levels to suggest a mountainous terrain. The plants filling these terraces and rooftop gardens literally spilled over and down the sides on the terrace walls and the result was the "Hanging Gardens".
The fact that these gardens were built by a fabulously wealthy king to impress a queen, and the fact that their beauty was so legendary as to be remembered 2000 years later, prompted me to decide that my design should try to capture that legendary beauty as my highest priority.
|
Construction Notes
Building the gardens started out with a few simple blocks for towers and terraces, plus a few reflecting ponds, all arranged to be pleasing from a given camera view. In this case, I didn't build it first and then go looking for a nice view, but rather selected the view from the beginning and built it to look nice in that view. Luckily for me, nothing reliable was known about its architectural layout, so my guess was as good as anybody else's.
The famous Ishtar gate in Baghdad (where Babylon once was) is still standing, and it has a fabulously intricate mosaic tile work on it. So I wanted to do arches with splendid mosaic tile work. I had laid out several sizes of arches, and didn't want to take the easy way out by making one mosaic arch and just scaling some bigger or smaller, because the ancient craftsmen would have used the same size tile (and more of them) on the bigger arches, and the same size (but less of them) on the smaller arches. So I built four arching walls at different sizes and used flattened cubes as mosaic bricks for each, keeping the brick size constant and using more on the bigger arches. The biggest one had 7000 bricks. I then rendered out all four arches as Image Texture Maps and applied each to a wall of the same size.
You can see this in the center arch group, because the center arches are size 3 and some arches beside them are size 2 (smaller), and the patterns are slightly different but the brick tiles are the same size. It's more work doing several different variations of a texture map, but I feel the result is worth the extra effort.
My hanging vines are simply terrains with long eroded segments, and given the foliage texture. The flowers I struggled with quite a bit before finally just duplicating a vine terrain, erasing what was there, hitting the Spikes button in the TE, and then erasing any spikes that were not in the same general shape as the vine terrain I had duped. I gave the spike terrains a bright purplish or orangish color to suggest flowers.
|
|
