13 October 2011

Casa del Menandro Model Complete

After 5 months of work, the model of the Casa del Menandro is finally complete. Who knew that attempting to recreate every minute architectural detail of an incredibly complex structure would be so time-consuming? Now that the thing is finished, however, I have to say that I’m pretty pleased with it. The model has been constructed in two different forms: one with boundaries and one without. A video of the unbounded model can be found below -- it contains a few moments in which the program had a difficult time rendering the shading correctly, but otherwise it turned out pretty well.


And here are some images of the bounded version:






One thing that I have definitely learned regarding SketchUp: it does not like irregular plans/structures. And because the plans of most Pompeiian houses are not orthogonal, the process of linking walls/floors/roofs together can prove to be very, very difficult. If someone out there happens to know how to model irregular/multi-planar shapes in SketchUp without using multiple triangles or polygons, I would certainly be interested in learning about the technique!