CONSTRUCTION OF A CATHEDRAL CHAPTER HOUSE (PART 1 OF 2)

Several months ago I decided to work on a cathedral chapter house with the intention of using it as a basis for an animation.  A chapter house is a large meeting room associated with cathedrals or collegiate churches.

I first had to do some research to determine how this would look and whether or not I would built a real (existing) chapter house or whether to build a fictional one in the style of a historical chapter house.  In the end I decided to build the chapter house associated with Salisbury Cathedral.  In particular I decided to build the chapter house as it looked around 1870.  Historical photos aided me in making sure the construction was accurate for the time period.

One nice thing about chapter houses is that they tend to have a large amount of symmetry to them.  In this case the Salisbury Chapter House is an octagonal room and that makes construction easier since I could build one wall and simply duplicate it around.  Here are some images of the near completed model:

I built the statues last.  Using a freeware program called Make Human I was able to generate a human figure.  In Maya I moved the arms and legs the way I wanted and then created the clothing for the figure.