|
|
 |
|
| |
| The Mausoleum at Hallicarnassis |
 |
Historical Notes
The town of Hallicarnassis (modern day Bodrum in Turkey) was once considered a part of Caria, a portion of the Persian Empire. From 377 to 353 BC, Caria's ruler was King Mausolus. As with many rulers of history, Mausolus contemplated his own death and wanted to build a memorial to himself while he was still alive to insure it would be a fitting tribute to his greatness. So he planned and commenced the construction of a great tower that would be his tomb and forever remind the people of the land of his greatness.
Caria was a port of trade and Egyptian and Greek ships frequented the harbor. Indeed Caria almost seemed to be a melting pot of the three cultures (Carian, Egyptian, Greek) so Mausolus chose for his tomb design a structure that respected the three cultures. The stepped base was Carian, the column level was Greek (with Ionic columns), and the roof was a stepped pyramid suggestive of the Egyptian pyramids.
The structure towered over everything else in the city, but King Mausolus never saw it finished. He died during its construction and his Queen Artemesia supervised the completion of it. It stood for eighteen hundred years, before being toppled by an earthquake in the 1400's AD.
The tomb of Mausolus came to be called the Mausoleum, and even today the word "mausoleum" indicates a large, stately tomb of an important person.
The size and structure are reasonably well documented. Several of the lion statues that circled the roof are now in museum collections. The four horses that pull the chariot on the rooftop are also well documented and parts of the horses are also in museum collections.
|
Construction Notes
Since the structure was well documented in size, shape, and location in the city, I laid out the preliminary structure at the scale of 4 Bryce Units to 1 foot. As with my other Wonders, I looked to the feature that required one complicated object to be replicated, and that again was the columns. Since they were a variation of the Ionic columns (like the Temple of Artemis), I took one of the Temple columns and modified it so the top scroll design had scrolls facing four sides, not two sides like in the Temple.
Once the column was modified and scaled to this building, I positioned and duplicated the number of columns I needed for it to look complete from my chosen view.
The chariot on the roof is one of the more impressive features, and I had quite a bit of fun making the chariot itself modeling it from primitives using boolean groupings. The horses were created by sculpting with stretched spheres to create a single leg (front or back) or the torso or head. These sphere sculptures were rendered out in white against a black background to be used as Light Maps (also called grayscale maps) that I then used to shape lattices in the Terrain editor. So each horse is six lattices (four for legs, one for torso, and one for the head/neck). This allowed me some Freudian to pose the various horse heads at different attitudes up or down. I also had two variations on a front leg so I could get a bit of variety in leg postures.
The lions were similarly made with preliminary Light Maps used to shape lattices.
For this scene, I needed a town but I needed one that was simple in terms for polygons and object count so I could replicate the buildings in large numbers. What I did was first create Image Texture Maps of several sized tile roofs and several side walls of buildings (some with windows and doors, others with just windows). Then I built a module of buildings out of just cubes and pyramids, letting the Image Maps of walls and tile roofs provide all the detail. I then arranged these buildings in a module that was 2x3 proportional units, so I could put 2 the long way exactly beside 3 the short way. This allowed me to rotate the module for a variety of views that each made the buildings look different.
There are probably thirty or so modules in the town.
The view in the day scene I locked down very quickly and stayed with throughout the construction phase. Then I finally got adventurous and started looking for views from the other side, from the harbor looking into the town and the Mausoleum. The Twilight Scene is from this view, but once I positioned my camera there, I realized I'd only created columns to look good from the other side. So I selected all the columns, grouped them, and rotated the entire group so again, from this view, it appears that all the columns are there when in fact only a little more than half are.
I did the same thing with the Lion statues, selecting them all and rotating the group to my camera side.
Setting the lights for the Twilight scene was intriguing because I wanted just isolated points of light in the otherwise dark town. So I carefully set each light near a building to glow against a wall I could see from my view.
To further enhance the sense of darkness falling on the town, I set two spotlights far off to the right set at No Falloff and intensities of -1. These negative lights darkened the right sides of the buildings, so the twilight coming from the left was emphasized. Then a added one spotlight (No Falloff, Intensity 1, tinted yellowish) far to the left, near the mausoleum, to shine back over the town like the last vestiges of sunlight creeping over the horizon.
|
|
|
