Raindrop Village
by: Daniel Weddle

Raindrop Village as it stands is a shell, monument, or ruin of a people who were one with their environment.  When viewed through a religious scope one could classify their central tower and radial dwellings as a sort of pagan monument; however these people were merely the students of nature and used natural phenomenon as the basis for their architectural development.  The tower and living spaces mimic a drop of water leaping from a puddle, with the undulations in the ground surrounding each structure mimicking radial waves.  Every wall, floor, and ceiling of each structure is semi transparent, permitting a constant and near full emersion in the environment.  The ripples surrounding each structure form perfect tiers for the planting of crops and reflect the subsistent nature of the inhabitants.

Originally Raindrop Village consisted of merely the central tower.  The tower on its own was too readily describable as an observation deck and there was little information to indicate a colony of inhabitants living within and around the tower.  To achieve a more complete dialog regarding the living habits of the inhabitants eight radial arms were attached to the central tower by hallways each terminating in a separate living structure. The pattern of the living structures is meant to reflect a random pattern of nature that has been rendered through a people who incorporate math in their attempt to mimic nature while establishing functional spaces.

From a technical standpoint Raindrop Village was created using Autodesk’s Maya 3D.  The original tower began as a Cube that had had the Smooth Function administered one time.  From there the smoothed cube was expanded using the Extrude Function.  Using the Extrude Function ensured the integrity of the original three tiered tower and provided a relatively low poly count model consisting of one continuous face.  The eight small radial dwellings were created from the original tower through the use of the Duplicate Command.  Only the bottom two tiers of the original tower were duplicated which left an open hole at the top of the duplicated structure.  This hole was filled using the Fill Hole Command and then the structure was scaled down to the size in the final model.  To get a sense of the relative size of the final structures several renders have been taken that include a grey rectangle that represents an adult male human.  The cylindrical shape of the central tower consisted of 16 separate faces.  Every other face was removed from the second story of the first tier and then halls were created using the Create Polygon Tool with Snap to Points Magnet turned on.  To apply the textures Planar Mapping was used from the y-axis and then the UV maps were scaled up to the desired size.  The textures were sourced online and then reworked in Photoshop.  The textures were refined using the offset command so that the tiling of the image would be seamless. Then they were proportioned to a binary format of 512 by 512 pixels.