In this project, I was tasked with recreating a medieval building from Winchester’s history. I chose to recreate Old Minster the capital of Christianity around 660 AD to 1093 AD. To create the model I used ArchiCAD, a piece of software that I was introduced to in my third year.
To start I tried to find as much information that I could to get a good idea of what the building looked like and how it was constructed. I was lucky as I was able to find a floor plan like image and many images of other recreations.
To get the walls right I used the floor plan for the location of the walls and the other images for the height and other information. I did not have all the dimensions so a lot of it was guesswork but I did have some, meaning that I could roughly get them to scale.
Once the walls were done I then went to work on adding a roof to the building. I mainly used the past recreations but they did differ from one another so I went off a combination of both. To add windows I stuck with one of the reference photo’s and the pattern was that all of the windows were the same over the church but each recreation had a different style. I did have to adapt the style a little due to my skills with the software.
ArchiCAD comes with a method of rendering built into the software which I decided to use. To improve the render I built a quick environment around the model to stop it from appearing as if it was floating in midair. I also played around with adding trees and other elements but decided against it as it didn’t look right.
Rendering It took a couple of attempts to get the render looking right. It took a bit of playing around with camera angles and also with lighting and the environment I had created. On this page are some of the final renders that I came up with along with the one at the start of the project chapter.
Over the past couple of months, I have been playing around with a 3D printer. I have mainly been 3D printing existing models to get use to the settings and what I am able to change but I have printed of a couple of projects that have been of my own design. I created the models in fusion 360, exported it as OBJ file. I then used Cura to slice the model and tweak it so adjust print times and quality. Below is a slide show of some of the prints I have completed with varying levels of success. Where necessary I included the 3d models.
During this semester we have been working through a couple of projects during the weekly lectures. One of these projects was the Old Minster project and the other was this one. For this project, I was tasked to create a site plan from a image given to us by our lecturer. We didn’t need to go into a lot of detail as it was just a plan but it would teach us the fundamentals of using ArchiCAD.
To start we traced around the plan to create the site green as a slab, then on a new layer, I traced around the roads as accurately as I could. I then used the solid element operations tool to indent the road into the site plan so there was a slight curb.
After the roads were done I used the same method as before to add the pond to the site plan I then went and added the path using the same method again. Doing this showed me the importance of using layers properly and making sure they are well organised.
Using a combination of the hotspot tool and the object tool I placed all of the necessary houses and trees, I started with the trees and placed them accordingly to the original image. The houses were a little more complicated as I needed to have different sizes, shapes and angles. Due to the fact accuracy wasn’t important I did take some creative liberty with some of the angled houses as I was unsure how to do them accurately.
Below are a couple of views of the finished site plan. Overall this project along with the Old Minster project was a good introduction to the ArchiCAD software and the techniques used to make different types of models.
