Temple of Kukulcan

Blender Courses Talk
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#1

I decided to make a scale mode of the temple of Kukulcan (the example Mayan pyramid shown in the lecture). I looked up architectural dimensions online, muddled about with Sumerian cubits, asked for some geometry magic from hubby and got down to brass tacks.

Kulcan is a 30m temple (pyramid 24m and temple building 6m). The base is approx 55m and the average inclination of the stepped terraces is 53 deg. However, each of the 9 terraces is individually sloped at 73 deg. And each of the 4 staircases has 91 steps and rises to 45 deg.

My greatest satisfaction ā€“ after doing all the math ā€“ came when the array of 91 steps on a 45 deg staircase butted up perfectly against the sides and the top of the pyramid. I detached the whole staircase structure and replicated it 3x for all sides of the pyramid.

At the last minute, I decided to replicate the stonework on pyramid slopes so chopped up the main structure, worked on one quarter and deleted all the others. I replicated 3x again and reassembled the pyramid.

mayan_pyramid_v12_toportho
mayan_pyramid_v12_toportho1303Ɨ767 136 KB
mayan_pyramid_v12_render
mayan_pyramid_v12_render1303Ɨ767 230 KB
mayan_pyramid_v12_preview
mayan_pyramid_v12_preview1303Ɨ767 252 KB

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#2

Looks great. How did you do the details on the slope?

#3
  1. Separated the quarter pyramid by its loose parts
  2. Subdivided each side-face 6x, IIRC
  3. Selected the faces that would would give me the first layer pattern and extruded these outward
  4. Selected the faces for the line carving and extruded those outward again
  5. Used limited dissolve to clean up all the unneeded subdivisions and leave only the extruded areas
  6. Created the corner bevels by extruding and joining the corner vertices of the extruded faces.
  7. Cleaned up miscellaneous messy areas and flipped some normals around.
  8. Joined the whole thing back together again.

=)

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#4

Nice work here ! It looks great :+1:

You can be proud of yourself :wink:

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#5

Hey, really nice! have you done one quarter of the one floor, than duplicate the rest to make floor complete, and then duplicate and scaled whole bottom floor to make the other ones to the top?
Iā€™m thinking to try this, just want to see what are the options :smiley:

#6

I followed the tutorial in constructing the basic pyramid, adding my own scaling for the slope angles before insetting/extruding each new terrace. I also followed the instructions for adding two edge loops for the stairs, again adding specific measurements for the width. This gave me the cutout for two sets of stairs (front and back). But because this temple has 4 sets of stairs, I repeated the edge loops procedure to get two more sets of stairs.

So now I had four corner terraces and four sets of stairs. I realized at this point that it would be easier to do all the detail work on 1 set of stairs and 1 set of corner terraces. So I broke my model apart (EDIT mode, P) and deleted 3 sets of stairs and 3 sets of corner terraces. I was left with 1 set of stairs, 1 set of terraces and the square temple on top.

I then worked on the stairs and the terraces until I was satisfied with the appearance. And then I simply duplicated these parts to make the pyramid whole and symmetrical. If your pivot points for the stairs and the corner terraces are set correctly, rotating each duplicated part by 90 each time will position them perfectly.

Hope that helps and cheers!

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