I couldn’t resist rendering this little section out in a 360-viewable format.
It literally took 20 minutes to render out each frame, but it’s wonderful to be able to save this progress in a way where you can pause the video and just use your mouse to “look around” the scene.
Just think, once this is in VR, you’ll be able to choose where to go and how close you get to anything!
Making this Fort is an ambitious project, especially since the buildings within span the tastes of four generations of Mughal Emperors.
I don’t know what possessed me to try to make the Naulakha (or the Queen’s Pavillion). Maybe it’s because this is one of the smallest monuments in this Fort, or maybe because I had the most pictures of it from my former research. Either way, I jumped into making it and have been editing it for a month to make it feel right.
Finally though, I feel like I’m making a breakthrough. First, I started making sense of the patterns, then I spent ages fiddling with the proportions of the building to make it sit better. And, because I need to keep modeling in Blender to really build that muscle-memory, I added in some rough side-buildings too. (No arches or pillars in those yet, I’m still making really ugly ones!)
Now, please be kind about the patterns and stuff, all of this is taking me way longer than normal! But, as I said, I’m taking today’s progress as a win!
And finally…
After a couple of months of just writing about the Lahore Fort Project, I finally decided to go back into 3D and try to make something!
This was harder than I expected.
There are a million components to everything, and literally every surface has some new and intricate pattern all over it!
Even as I try to simplify the process by breakign things up into modules, this building… probably this Fort, will totally give me a new set of grey hair!
It’s finally looking a bit like the actual building… but alas, I’ve barely started applying the patterns in here.
But I’m excited! It’s a building!
In an unexpected turn of events, it seems I cannot move forward with the Dynamic Addis.
So I am redirecting current explorations and revisiting the graveyard of ideas and projects from my past.
I’m sure every artist has one. The place where you keep those projects that were “finished” but never met your standards, or the great idea that didn’t fit the pitch outline, or a concept that was too big or too complex for that time and place.
These ideas are saved on napkins, sketchbooks, notebooks… digital or analog, it doesn’t matter, because we have sparks like these a million times a day and the only hope of ever making them a reality is to save them for the right moment.
This was one such moment. More than 20 years after the original research project, I have finally found the solution to my biggest peeve about my original presentation.
Trying to present something like the Lahore Fort in a book form, with a selection of (comparatively) tiny photographs was the greatest limitation of that time.
Now, years later, it finally hit me. I am no longer constricted by the size of a printable page, or a printable photograph.
As an animator, I can present this world on a big screen.
Even better, I can make it a 360 or VR space and really immerse my audiences into this experience!
And what better time to do it, when the need for positive representation of Islamic cultures is at the forefront of every conversation!
Working on this project was an eye-opening experience for my teenage self.
I learned so much about my culture that was never taught in a classroom (and it should have been).
Now, as an educator myself, I realize the onus is on me to educate the students of today.
I have to remember that I cannot treat teaching like a job where I just demo some tools and call it a day.
Teachers/Professors can make more than worker drones, they can create and nurture thinking, breathing human beings!
And the only way to do that is to show them the possibilities and connect them to their past.