Final Renders

Adding some more renders of my finished building, the shots are wireframed and smooth untextured.

building redo

I went and redid the boxes to look like actual buildings and now its off to render more of the final stages.

Final stage

I decided to add the final images showing the angles I will be using more the 360 turnaround of the gherkin.

test turnaround

More work

I have finished the outside of the gherkin and now I am slowly working into the important parts of the interior.

Work in progress

Here is the progress I am making on the outer shell of the gherkin. As you can see, there are no tricks everything there is modelled and I am currently working with 43,000 polys.

In depth research

I forgot to post some more research that I got. Since the creators of the gherkin won't send out blueprints, I came across the book '30 St Mary Axe, a tower for london' which has a lot of detailed information about the building and a lot of detailed images that I could not acquire any time soon.

First attempts

But I didn't what the model to get confusing or have a large polycount since I just started, so i decided that the cylinder would represent the big diamonds and I would have splines for the frames and these images represent me working through this. Furthermore I thought this would be the best route if i wanted it to be detailed and have not have a large polycount.

As you can see the only way I could get the diamonds was by putting to cylinders inside themselves with one being mirrored.

What I gathered was that, the gherkin has 10 upward big diamonds and it goes around 20 times. Also the gherkin has 41 floors and is 180 metres high. So in this image, I am trying to incorporate all that information into a cylinder in 3ds max which is to the real world scale of the gherkin whislt using the taper and twist modifer.

More images

I went back to the building in the morning to see how the environment changes with daylight.

The brief

In my university digital animation course, the class has been set an assignment, which is to create a realistic 3d model in 3ds max or Maya and we could choose from one of four buildings (if we were extra special or extra crazy we could do them all).

I choose to create 30 St Mary Axe (the gherkin) because it is in east london, making it easier for me to access since I live in east london and it didnt seemed the most overwhelming when looking at it.

Before I am allowed to start building it, I have to visit the location and acquire some research.

Some pictures I took at night.