Pilgrim's Progress: the Sets

I wanted something both elegant and impressive for the Palace Beautiful.  The exterior was based on a monastery I had seen in a World Book Encyclopedia- San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy (Shown below)  The turret at the top is the room where Christian spent the night.  To the right is the extension where he receives the full armor of God.

You never really get a good look at the exterior in the finished project, since Christian arrives after the sun has set.

The interior needed to be warm and pleasant while still maintaining a rich feel.  So I added a fire and gave the lamps a yellow tint.

Christian's room is your standard starry domed octagonal bedroom with spiral staircase leading up through the marble floor.  The bed is incredibly sturdy.

How does one make a convincing forest canopy?  I ended up using several terrain layers that were textured to resemble leaves.  This is the scene where By-Ends is passed by Christian and Hopeful.  Hours of work for a few brief clips.

Vanity Fair was my biggest problem, since it included crowds of moving people and a sprawling city.  The buildings are simple eight-sided polygons, basically cubes with creased tops.  If only I had understood how to use the replicator in Carrara, this could have been much easier and would have looked much cleaner.

As it was, I had higher quality characters interacting with a large but lower quality environment.  To try and cover up my cheapness I utilized intense fog and depth of field to try and blur everything beyond the characters.  This actually gave the scene an interesting feel, but it wasn't quite enough.  I had to delete the clips that came too close to my crowd people.

Of all the sets I designed, my favorite is Doubting Castle.  As the modeling progressed it developed its own style of dull, gray colors, which fit nicely with the whole "Despair" thing I was trying to have going on.  Really, the rest of the movie is pretty color-saturated, so taking a break from that for this sequence of events seems like it was a good idea.

I had fun doing my utmost to make the dungeon a miserable place.  The slime on the floor may have been overkill, but I like the big hooks on the wall.  Something that you can't see in the movie is that the dungeon has no roof.  The walls slant inward to a point where they just form a vent into the open air.  I thought it would be cool to have snow falling down through the ceiling and into the dungeon, but never got around to it.

The front view of Doubting Castle is just a facade, a fake, a lie.  For a while I considered making the castle more of a tower, with the dungeon as a cage suspended in midair (which was occasionally done in the Middle Ages).  That's where the little bit of architecture outside the gate came from- it was originally the design for the whole castle.

I put menhirs, ancient standing stones, on either side of the gate.  It gives the castle a sense of eery age.  I wanted the whole thing to have some sort of stonehenge feel, but that's as far as I got.

For some reason heights always make a fight scene more exciting (for instance, the climactic duel between Luke and Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back).  This is why I had Apollyon beat Christian back up the stairs and throw him out on the edge.

No amount of modeling will ever successfully convey an accurate picture of New Jerusalem, because no one really knows what heaven will look like.  I made a pretty good Celestial City, but decided in the end to leave what the city looked like mostly to the viewers' imaginations.

I am now selling this model on the3dstudio.com, since I didn't end up using it in the film.

Feeling like a big fat entrepreneur, here's the link to my products:

The mine Lucre, maintained by Demas the apostate, is a treacherous place, as is successfully conveyed by crooked, creaking boards and rotting planks.

The Delectable Mountains turned out to be in the shape of cross.  I'm probably borrowing some idea here with my aqueduct-like paths, but as long as I can't think of what it is, there's no problem.  The shepherd's tent was added later on.