Next Dimension: Norfolk Mill

Click here for a GIF of the mill with its sails turning.

It’s late and I really ought to be in bed, so my apologies in advance for the countless errors and contradictions that are inevitably going to plague this post.

I’ve been doing some more 3D this evening. The idea of building a typical Norfolk drainage mill came quite innately, really; I’ve written beneath my drawings of them how they have long fascinated me and how powerful I think they are a subject, given that they tend to be either in a state of wonderful resplendence or haunting disrepair, slowly sinking into the boggy nowhere of the marshes.

It’s taken about six or seven hours to get to the result you see here. Given that I was going almost entirely from the images burned into my mind, I think it turned out pretty well! The most challenging part of the exercise, by far, was the boat-shaped cap. It is not perfect by any stretch, cobbled together using three arches and a loft-NURBS standing upon a distorted cylinder for the skirting. I don’t really know what happened to the texture on the front face of the cap, it seems to have gone a bit doolally without my permission.

The prospect of the fantail scared me a little, but it was joyously simple to create – a sliced tube and a cuboid, cloned radially with a slight angular transformation – and creating the stripe pattern was equally pleasant.

Indeed, it was generally far less of a headache all round than I envisioned. I need to work on building landscapes, though – that’s one thing that didn’t go terribly well, which is quite something when you consider that Norfolk is flatter than the flattest pancake. I tried to render a scene with actual ‘hair’ grass, but it was taking several minutes a frame, and I’m phenomenally impatient. The physical sky tools were intriguing, allowing you to put in a date and time and light accordingly… however, the apocalyptic green sunsets I was getting suggested I was maybe not calibrating it correctly.

Here’s a slightly closer shot allowing for greater perusal of the texture. My my, that door really is close to the river, isn’t it? Best keep that closed. But never mind about that.

• 3d
• Art
• cinema 4d
• design
• drainage mill
• model
• norfolk
• windmill
• windpump