16/12/2020 Acropolis

The Acropolis of Athens is an achient citadel on top of a mountain located above the city of Athens. Before it was known as the Acropolis, it was known as the Cecropia named after the serpent-man, Cecrops, who was the first supposed Athenian King. It contains a bunch of ancient buildings, the most famous building being the Parthenon. The word 'Acropolis' means "highest point".

Parthenon

The Parthenon is a temple dedicated to the Greek Goddess Athena. The construction of The Parthenon began back in 447 BC which was when the Athenian Empire had their most power. When it was built, the foundations were made of limestone and its pillars were made of pentelic marble, the foundations and pillars were both made in the Doric Order Architectural Style. Rounded up, the building is 31m wide, 70m long and then 14m tall (46 feet).

I like this model because its got a sandstone like texture while still not needing too much detail on the texture. The model does have a lot of things missing like the tympanum which goes in the center of the roof, however it is probably best that this is left out since its a lot of detail in a very small area and would probably look better without it if not modelled correctly.

The pillars are really simple which is good for making lots of copies of since i would not individually model each pillar because it would be a waste of time pretty much.

Limestone Pillars

These examples of limestone pillars are mostly meant to display the material since these pillars don't have a lot thats special about them, the base is a good inspiration though.

A Parthenon model i made in unreal, this gave me some good ideas on proportions. I made it through grey boxing and using a floor plan.

A screenshot of The Parthenon from Assasins Creed Odyssey. Since i don't own Assasins Creed Odyssey i instead watched some gameplay and looked at screenshots, Tony's gameplay and analysis was a great help. I learnt that reusing assets is common in the game industry and that models don't always have to look perfect.

Propylaea

The Propylaea was the main enterance to the acropolis and would act as a gateway to the rest of the building and land. There are three different ways to spell Propylaea, those being: Propylaea, Propylea or Propylaia. In Ancient Greek Architecture, the Propylaea is known as a monumental gateway. Construction started before the Parthenon back in 437 BC. The materials used to build the Propylaea were white pentelic marble and grey eleusinian or limestone. Iron was sometimes used however people agreed that iron weakend the building.

I really like the colours of the tympanum but it may have to be left out since modelling it would be very difficult. This also goes for the statues of warriors and horses outside the building.

For the Propylaea pillars i will reuse the ones from the parthenon since they are basically identical, however i would just change the material used from limestone to marble from what my research has told me.

Pentelic marble

Grey eleusinain marble

Out of these two examples i much prefer Pentelic marble. In my opinion its just a lot more eye pleasing while the Grey eleusinain marble feels dirty while the propylaea would have been a very polished and clean place.

Erechtheion

The Erechtheion is an ancient Greek temple built in the North of the Acropolis. The temple was made for the two Greek Gods, Athena and Poseidon. The construction was started in 421 BC which was considered the golden age of the city.

It was built entirely of marble from Mount Pentelikon, with bits of black limestone. It had carved doorways and windows, and its columns were ornately decorated, they were painted, gilded and highlighted with gilt bronze and multi-colored inset glass beads. Instead of pillars, statues of women were used in some parts of the building. These were known as Caryatid which is a sculpted female figure serving as architectural support like a pillar. I don't think i will be able to fully model these Caryatids since they are human models which would probably not end up looking to good based on my modelling skill. Instead i would most likely use my pillars from my assets since 1. they would save time instead of having to make a new model and 2. they would fit in with the other pillars that are used for the Erechtheion. I enjoy the colour scheming on the top with the red, blue and yellow, they give of a feeling of wealth, espescially with the yellow.

Temple of Athena Nike

The Temple of Athena Nike was dedicated to the Godess Athena and Nike. It was built around 420 BC and is the earliest temple to be fully ionic on the Acropolis. The temple is very small in comparison to the other structures so this would probably be the quickest to make. Like most of the buildings, this building also as small carvings The temple uses ionic pillars which i have already made a capital for in the past.

The temple has a nice brick layerd wall which would be hopefully not too hard to model and would be able to be reused in many parts of the acropolis, the wall would be a part of the asset list for sure. I really love the redish tiled roof , it really goes togehter well with the grey bricks.

Here is my textured Ionic pillar that would most likely be used in a lot of these structures. However there is a lot i would change. First of all i would make the centre much longer since in reality this pillar is quite tiny which is something i didn't notice when modelling. Next would be the base, the base isn't too different from examples shown in my research but one thing i would change is the square base. Most of the pillars in the examples have either round bases or none at all. To make the round base i would just simple expand the rings at the bottom. Next is the center, i really like my spiral design however none of the pillars in the acropolis use this design unfortunatley. One thing i would not change is the capital, i already made an ionic capital so i will be using that model. My texture work would need some changing too, it doesn't really fit into the acropolis too well, i would instead use limestone mostly as my common material although i could use this marble texture for the propylaea.

Banners

Banners were seen quite a bit around the Acropolis. I couldn't find too many images of the actual designs from the acropolis but when looking at the Acropolis in things such as Assasins Creed Odyssey i can get a rough idea about what they looked like. They tended to use drawings and symbols, one example being The Owl Of Athena.

Modelling

The first model i started doing was a basic brick wall.

However after some evaluating i realised there was a lot of things wrong with this. For example if i want multiple walls to join together then i would need to change one of the sides. If both sides have bricks poking out on the same layer then they would not be able to join together. Another example is the bricks themselves, they are just simple cuboids with nothing changed and were way too sharp to be bricks. I will fix this by sculpting and using loop cut and the modifier subdivison to smoothen them out.

Adding the Subdivision modifier:

Using loopcut with the modifier on and pulling the shape to the sides but not fully to the side.

Then i changed the "Levels View" from 1 to 2 to make it look more smoother. I made sure to apply the modifier after i did any sculpting.

After that i started sculpting. To start with i used the fill tool and used the direction deepen.

I ended up makig three different kinds of bricks. I did this because i wanted to have a wide range of bricks to make the wall look more natural instead of reusing the same brick over and over. When adding them to the wall i will flip some copies of bricks to add more different kinds of bricks to make the wall look more real.