Section 2 Final Challenge: Mayan Pyramid (El Castillo)

[bRenderman]

I love so many of the other pyramid submissions, especially all the environmental details and models people are adding. There is so much creativity and new talent out there it is motivating and inspiring to see.

After finishing up the video lessons and completing most of the pyramid as-instructed, I chose to take a rebuild, based on El Castillo at Chichen Itza. It is based on the basic premise and skills from the video lessons, but I chose to come at parts of it a little differently in order to get the results I wanted and more closely approximate El Castillo’s structure and dimensions. I took a stab at a complementary color palette I imagine might have been used “back in the day”.

The entire experience, from the Section 2 modeling lessons to my pyramid rebuild really baked the Section 2 concepts in and I can’t wait to apply this to other models.

Reference:

[NP5]

Excellent job reproducing that real one.

You should be able to bevel those corners softer if you wanted to.

[bRenderman]

Thanks!

So I took a quick stab at bevel, but I don’t quite understand the behavior / result I get. It seems to be moving vertexes / edges in “random” directions. I’ve tried changing changing transform orientation to global, local, normals, etc but get similarly weird results despite the setting.

After poking around the mesh a bit, it looks like I have something deeper going on in the mesh itself. Maybe some duplicate geometry / vertexes were merged at some point during the build? I suppose I can go back through saved versions, before joining mesh objects and applying array mods to see if I can find out where I went wrong.

Cheers!

[NP5]

I was thinking more of the main corners that look rounded on the real one rather than those details which might be problematic to use bevel on, or there may be an apply scale and rotation issue that will affect bevelling.

The bit you show you do not want the edge that is at the top. You want the edge line that marks the colour change you helpfully have! Though I note closer up now, the shapes look a little undercut and slid over to the left. It is all possible to sort out but may not be worth the bother and be time to move on it is still very good as what it is.

[ChrisVifzack]

This is so cool! Amazing job!

[Paul_Burns]

Great job. I have been doing the same thing - trying to make my pyramid look like el castillo as much as possible. I like how you modeled the snake heads at the base of the steps.