Development

Designing the throne room

The three most important aspects of the brief are the 5000 triangles limit, the texture limit and scene size, so I constantly reminded myself of this as I designed my scene.
The first thing I did was to create a room from a cube that was 5x5x5 metres. 

As the chair was going to be the focus point of the scene I spent time working on the chair first, and wanted it to be more or less finished before working on the rest of the scene. I often use the Mirror Modifier because it saves heaps of time and keeps things symmetrical. I kept my 3D model as close to my original sketch as possible as I quite liked the design, I think it has a really nice shape to it. I first modelled the two rounded cushions before creating the frame. I created the frame with iso spheres and cylinders, the top of the frame by duplicating the top of the top cushion and using the Solid Modifier.

I really liked the idea of having the kings logo as a piece at the top of the chair and to have feet of the chair so they look the same as his feet. I thought it would be cool to have two big feet for the chair rather than four feet. The whole scene was designed with the colour scheme of the king in mind, conveniently this included regal colours. 

For the chair, rather than using textures I thought it looked much better to use simple materials in blender to give it the look I wanted. I created a gold material for the frame and a velvet material for the cushions, I went on to use these materials in other areas of the scene too. 
As the chair was the focus of the scene I didn't hold back too much on triangles but I was still very careful as I knew I needed plenty left of the 5000 limit to create the scene. It was perhaps ambitious of me to aim for such a rounded look for the chair and scene while using few polys, to get a really smooth look you need a lot of polygons/triangles, but I think I managed to achieve a pretty good look in the end, in line with the style I wanted.

Once I was happy with the look of the chair, I created the hammer. I thought it would be really cool to have the hammer leaning in the corner of the scene. This was one of the most enjoyable parts of modelling the scene. It is such a simple effective design, it was great piecing it all together.

I first carefully modelled each part of the hammer using cylinders I manipulated. I cut the model into pieces to texture separately.  

I used Gimp to colour the star logo. 

UV mapping the textures to position them properly on the model.

The wood texture looks really great, I used the displacement effect with the node editor like I did before with my wooden chair. This works really well for wood textures, to add extra depth to the texture. I used a small part of the same texture for the handle, and I made a chrome material for the edge of the hammer. I really like the way the hammer looks, I think it looks enough like the source material but is subtly different enough to be my own, this was the one aspect of the scene that was not an original design. I think it fits in with the semi realistic yet cartoon stylised feel of the rest of the scene.

Next I shaped the windows in the back wall of the scene. Once I was happy with the windows I deleted the wall and replaced it with a clean wall/plane that I placed the windows in, this cut down the triangle count and made texturing the wall easier.

I made the steps out of extruded and shaped cubes. I made the red carpet out of a plane that I made solid and shaped around the steps.

I wanted the edge of the carpet to match the king's jacket so I created a white fluffy edge, using hair particles. 

I used the node editor to get the right look for the white fluff.

I used cubes to model the columns, I really liked the look of these but I felt they didn't go with the style of my scene in the end, so I modelled them again with cylinders so they were more round an minimalist. I also didn't like the steps so I completely remade them. I added some torches modelled from iso spheres including flames created using the node editor and a plane with an Array Modifier. I finished the scene with flags made from planes with the few triangles I had left so I had to be careful, I think I had enough to make them look fairly realistic, and I quite like the way they look.