Modeling Medieval Item

Last week we made a trip to the museum, to sap some photos of an item that we would like to model for our next assignment.

I was a little bit disappointed with the visit. I had expected to find some interesting pieces of medieval armor and weaponry. However, there were barley any weapons, and but a few helmets, way to simple to make a good modeling task. After searching the museum for a few hours, I finally settled with a early medieval baptismal font. I consider religious items to be some of the most interesting from past times. They’re always cluttered with different symbols and icons, bearing a somewhat mystical appearance. This font is no different, it’s full of carved pictures of animals and… Things. Above all else, what really makes me love these religious objects, is the fact that they’ve been used in old rituals. It’s something about the hocus pocus that I really like.

When choosing a visual style, I had the choice of going with either Skyrim, Uncharted or Asterix. I didn’t want to go with Asterix, I might have done that if I was modeling a character, but I don’t want to make an Asterix style baptismal font. I was stuck between skyrim and uncharted for quite some time, Skyrim had more of a robust style clear volumes and shapes. In Uncharted on the other hand, everything sort of blended together. There’s a lot of overgrown stone temples were you can’t really see any clear boundary between vegetation and stone structure.

I finally went with Uncharted, I imagine it would be a more interesting challenge. I’ll probably put more emphasis on the decay of the font, making more visible cracks and tears, maybe even have some parts of it fallen off entirely. I’d do this to make it fit with the ruined state of the temples found in the uncharted games (or at least the concept art). I’d also make the carved images blend into stone a bit more, still having a lot of detail, but making it more difficult to see what they depict. Finally, (if we get work with a textures a lot),  I would probably add more color, color variety, and make them softer.

I don’t really know what negative stereotypes I could possibly risk bringing forth in this model, I mean, it’s a font! Maybe I could make it stereotypical christian by slapping a bunch of crucifixes onto it, but I don’t think that’s a risk. I don’t really know what positive stereotypes there would be to use either. Again, I guess I could use christian symbols, to convey that it is a used for christian rituals. However, I don’t think that would be necessary.

I don’t think modeling this will be too difficult. the heads on the font’s neck might prove problematic. If they would have been positioned symmetrically  around the sides, it would probably not have been that much of a problem. But now they don’t seem to be, and getting a good edge flow might prove difficult. I think the same problem could appear if I was to add more cracks and tears, since it could also interfere with the edge flow, especially since that seem to be one of my weaknesses. However, if I make sure to plan my modeling better this time, I don’t think that should be too much of a problem.