Creating Night Elf Shrine

Worked on some more assets to put into my Darkshore scene. Used some new tools as well. To build the roof of this shrine I used the revolve tool. Such a wonderful tool, really saves a lot of time. After I had the roof made, I used duplicated the faces and used them as separate tiles. For the arches I built the four pillars and cut holes in the top in the shame of hexagons. Then used the bridge ability with a curve between two pillars. Pretty satisfied with the end result.

Had some difficulty with the general shape of this roof in the beginning. Ultimately, I ended up building it out of curves and then using the loft tool. Another great tool for modelers! I started by building curves that thinking of the structure from an othographic/horizontal standpoint. Then I used the CV's on those curves to attach them to other curves that I had made that intersected the first curves I made. In the end it created this curved roof structure that almost looks like a plus sign from a top view perspective.

Found a very nice tutorial on youtube to build some realistic looking rope. Although the end result was heavy in polygons, each of the four stacks is roughly 5,000 quads, I was pleased wit the result. I'll prob end up making some kind of low poly version later one, when the camera is far away from this asset, but ultimately I will keep the high poly in when the camera is right in front of it. The workflow method involved taking spherical polygons (4 of them) and attaching them in a 2 x 2 formation that formed a square with the circles all flush up against the each other's sides. I had then made the pillars a live surface and built curves around the pillars and tried to make it look realistic in how it was wrapped. Lastly I extruded the spherical polygons along the curves I had made. The new helix polygon feature was an option, but I found it too neat for what I wanted.

 These are two screenshots showing some perspective views of the entire scene thus far. Thought I'd get a couple wireframe shots in their to give an idea about the construction from a technical standpoint. Overall the scene is coming along as expected.