I think I'm pretty lucky that I have such a solid background in layout design. The set
building comes very easily to me. I've always been the type of person who likes to take
things apart to see how they're put together. I've never taken this to a mechanical level
where I could take apart and rebuild an engine or anything like that. It's more on the
artistic level where I can see things in three dimensional form and recreate it on paper
very accurately.

I've begun to build the first set for the film, the "Laboratory" this week starting with
what I call"the tower". It's a machine that has a series of circular tubes stacked up along
4 poles. It was in my original set design. I built it out of a polygon box for the base, 4
cylinders for the poles and 20 torus shapes. I then went on to add details such as edge
strapping with rivets and a control panel with some guages and simple buttons.

I then duplicated the base for the other machines in the alcove area and rotated and v
aried the control panels to make each machine a bit different. I also added some lights to
the panels as well as some toggle switches for the 2nd alcove machine.

The third machine was an add on to fill up the empty corner. I drew the contour of the
bottle with the EP Curve tool and then revolved it to make it 3D.

I then built the dimensions of the room using nurbs planes for the walls and floor.
The beams were then added using plygon cubes sized and rotated appropriately.

I found a neat cobblestone image from a CD and used it for the surface of the walls
with a bumpmap. I was trying the same thing with the beams and the floor but I'm not
happy with the results.I'm just playing around with the Hypershader for the surfaces,
so not too much of what I've done so far will be kept for the final film. I've also put in a
few lights to get some ambiance.

The set still needs a lot of work though.