Notre Dame de Paris
Of course everybody knows this famous cathedral, actually being a symbol for Paris just like the Eiffel Tower itself.
It was seriously damaged by fire in 2019. Everybody may remember pics of the burning cathedral and the collapsing spire - to me it was a bit like 9/11, but it seemed to be an accident, not something terroristic... and fortunately nobody lost his life.
Anyway - the pics and videos of the burning cathedral grabbed my heart. So I decided to give it some place in my virtual Paris model and drag some special attention to it.
And this time I think about having some words about the modelling process as well.
As you might know Notre Dame was built in Gothic style - which means: straight geometry, lots of lancet archs, but also lots of details. Statues, floristic motives, spouters, painted glass...
I was curious about all the details - which ones to include, what could be skipped... I started without having a kind of master plan. Just let's start and look where it's gonna bring us to.
First decision was to build it from scratch - using OSM data for some general proportion informations only. And I found some useful pics here, which I decided to grab some elevation infos from.
Main reason was that I wanted to work with proper orientation and clean dimensions, not bothering about lots of decimal digits and strange angles...
So my general floor plan looked like this:
Have a look at the basics:
I was quite surprised that the spire (which got totally destroyed by the 2019 fire) was much higher than the main towers.
Let's have a word about the windows: most of them having this lancet armed shape which is so typical for Gothic architectual style. So I decided to create window frames by the use of Bezier curves:
To get them properly distributed around the building by at the same time respecting the bar system I worked with dummies first:
Next steps:
The spire might be worth having a little closer look:
Adding details over and over:
To avoid some "See-through effects" I placed a smaller, very simple object inside:
You might be interested in the level of details: I increased it a little bit, but it wasn't too hard. The cathedral consists of lots of repeating elements - which meant: model one, use multiple. Of course working with linked data was the way to go. Just compare:
Not really a part of the cathedral itself, but being attached to it there is the sacristy (which also hosts church treasure):
It was built about 1845 only and - together with the spire - is one of the newest parts of the cathedral.
There's another building located next to the Southern tower. I couldn't find out what it's good for, but of course it's part of the ensemble:
Lastly modelling the surroundings, adding greenery, lanterns and park benches:
The renders:
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