Part of the craziness of this week (and last) was working on the model of Jerusalem at the time of Nehemiah. I started two weeks ago, made some progress, didn’t like how it was going, and resolved to start over. The result was only one scene of Jerusalem in last week’s sermon.
This week I started over, liked how it was going, put it aside to work on other things, picked it up Friday and got to the point where the walls were almost complete. I went to bed Friday expecting to start producing ‘publication quality’ pictures first thing Saturday morning. Instead I found that the model was corrupted in the final save Friday, and I had to back way up and fix a hundred things in the model (mostly material textures).
Believe me I quickly instituted a system where one bad save would only set me back a half an hour. By 8:00 last night the model was back where it had been the night before, and I generated four or five images last night and this morning. I’m actually pretty happy with the results (though I’ll need to do some more tweaking this week).
The model is based on maps of Jerusalem at the time of Nehemiah, like this one:
The major adjustment I made in doing the model was to assume that the walls of Jerusalem at the time were made in wildly different styles and materials. I suspect this is at least somewhat true. So here’s how the model looks from an aerial view:
