I think he's primarly doing it for his portfolio. He was bemoaning the Ukrainian economy- a lot of political unrest on those parts apparently. He's doing freelance architectural visualisations but want to get into compositing. He wants to upsticks to Canada. But yes, that's the point, it's very obviously based on the movies. You can't make money from this stuff, whether it's based on the movies or not...It'd be awesome if he offered us a 1/4 res model or something. I'd even offer him $ for that.
I mailed the guy who has the model for the original Minas Tirith project on CGTalk. He's selling a render of it on TurboSquid for $20 and there's a comment form the artist saying "I couldn't upload the model as it's 180 mb" or something. That sounds to me like a back door, telling folks, I have the model, contact me and offer me $.
I could be wrong, but it seems a bit pointless to be selling a single render (not even multiple views of the model) on there....
Nah, in the end, the only way is to do it yourself, although I can understand you wanting to use our terrain Morcrist- just like we want to use someone else's Minas Tirith heh. Anyway, the terrain's far from perfect so you can go on to still do a lot of alterations and tweaks to it. I'd prefer it everyone got together and made one map, one Minas Tirith- all to shockingly good levels of expertise. That's the ideal, but the world ain't like that. And I guess a large focus of talent and interest like that would more likely invoke a C&D anyway. I also like plurality as well, I don't like it when a group of people start to think that their's is the only way to do something. LoTR is a book, a masterpeice, but it's not brain surgery- what I mean is, have a perspective, it's not going to save you life on the operating table. So have fun with it. The films are the films and the books are the books. They're different. I love the films. I love the books more. But bear in mind Tolkien couldn't do everything to the standards/knowledge he wanted to.
I think the MineCraft community is pretty cool for their openess to share their models. I guess that there's an element of well they're not full CG quality models, so selling them is not really an obvious option. Not that I'm criticising the modellers on there- I've seen loads of freaking amazing models, not least the M-E stuff.
I've always liked Naismith. I think out of all of the artists I've seen he has this kind of old story book feel to his work. CG is not even on the horizon. I think stylistically he's my favourite Tolkien artist.
Yes, Fonstad had the city walls at about 945m, the films at 1207m. I think Nasimith's is at the Fonstad end, probably wider. Fonstad used the tower of Ecthelion's width as compared to the Tolkien sketch I think. She imagined that, knowing the height of the tower, a width of anything greater than 150 feet would make the spire less a "spike" as described, but more squat. Extrapolating from that, she got the overall city dimensions. It's open to question especially since she's going off a really rough sketch, but it's a sound process.
At 1000 feet high that's some impressive bit of masonry :-D that pic Pyton recalls a castle I went to recently in Yorkshire called Skipton castle. It's a very similar outlook, although it's not quite as high as that- maybe 150 ft. But the views from the castle rooms were amazing. Imagine what a 1000 feet loks like??
I like the prow, the way it goes up at the end, more for artistic, naturalistic reason. It's more romantic. I like the prow in the films as well for practical reasons- you would really want to be able to look out over the lands from a good vantage. I think the reasoning would be, if they're capable of mining and building that city, then they'd be capable of levelling off that prow at the end for better views.//ah I see it's a man made structure so that's irrelevant.
Yes the black wall needs to be in there obviously!
We'll either have to cut the model up into pieces or use a simpler one off Google Warehouse or something. I'd rather try a combination of simplify and cutting it up. I'll try a mesh decimation later in Max, see if I can get anything decent out of it.
I think distributing the terrain is fine- I think make it clear on the link page that an exchange of models for terrain is the idea here, or that we're looking for models. Maybe some folks will come over an offer something.
monks
