Rebuilding St. Mary’s Reculver
As mentioned in an earlier post, my first attempt to build Reculver was done entirely in iClone2 and did not take into account that in the early 18th century (early 1700s) that St. Mary’s would have been a complete church not just a couple of towers.
I did some internet research and found a small image of a plan from English Heritage and some old prints of sketches from various points in history but probably mainly late 18th century. Of course looking down on a plan does not tell you if a wall is 1ft high or 100ft high or at what point in history it may have been extended upwards or demolished.
As you can see from the plan above the aisle on the seaward or North side looks like it is longer than the one on the landward South side. I based my model on that, but having since looked at the remains as they today using Google Earth and having come across additional sketches on the internet, I now believe that this was probably a mistake. I also had to guess heights based on some info in Wikipedia about the height of the towers and the relativity of visual features in the historical images.
The plan also shows that the porch on the North side facing the sea is considerably larger than the porch on the South side, which I did reflect in my model. I also have to admit that to make my work a bit easier I printed the plan out, but due to various setting in my print preferences, it came out slightly compressed in the East – West plane which has compounded my errors as far as historical accuracy is concerned. Having said that there are also numerous discepancies between different historical sketches of St. Mary’s.
Due to my new version of Reculver being more complicated than my previous one, I decided to use the free version of Google Sketchup (now Trimble Sketchup) to build it. Google sketchup is great for letting you create complex objects by allowing you to extrude 2D images to make them 3D. So for complex arches, architraves, fluted columns etc. it is brilliant. In the end I didn’t make much use of this fantastic feature, because I cheated and borrowed objects such as arched windows and doors from the 3DWarehouse.
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/
So I started by building a very basic model in Sketchup.
Then I started to add some detail. Sometimes aligning new objects against the main building was a pain in the backside, especially because objects which are flat or almost flat (such as window panes) tend to disappear when viewed from certain angles. I sometimes found it necessary to leave a small gap between the object and the main structure to overcome this annoyance.
I figured that based on old sketches the church would have fallen in to disrepair and that parts of the roof may have caved and there would be ivy growing over it. Also my spires had been a bit simplistic when compared with those in old sketches. You can just make out that I elaborated the spires in the picture below. In fact I must have overdone this elaboration, because when you circle around the model they look thinner at certain angles than they do at other angles.
Unfortunately when I transferred the model into iClone using 3DXchange the ivy looked horrible. I also realised that the early 18th century when Smuggler Bill was doing his stuff was close to a century before the church was demolished. Perhaps at that time its condition has not been too bad, not that I had any evidence either way. So I ditched the ivy and re-instated the missing parts of the roof.
So I realised that my model was far from perfect from a historical standpoint, but decided to draw a line under it for the purposes of making my movie. I am sure I could spend the rest of my life trying to perfect it and even then it would have errors in it. I used iClone 3DXchange5 to transfer the model into iClone5.
Also in the unlikely event that someone might want to use the model or parts of it themselves I uploaded it to 3DWarehouse. Feel free to download it and use it or just play with it if you feel so inclined.
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ Just search for Reculver in the 3DWarehouse search box.
Note this URL is correct at the time of writing. It is possible that Trimble may migrate to a new URL in future in which case you will need to search for 3DWarehouse in your web browser.
Tony