After an hour of placing block after block, the foundation of the tower is complete.



I'm going to stick with working on the foundations for the time being. I'll start building upwards once I have the walls where they're supposed to be.

The next step is to work on the main building. A little bit more planning may be in order for this, though. I need to know where best to place the library. I need to research where the Great Curry Explosion occurred. And I really need to think about what to do with the north wing, considering that all of the important stuff happens in the south.

Sadly, I can't see the gateway from the tower's entrance. That means that you won't be able to see the tower when climbing the stairs, even at maximum view distance. I'm not sure if I should be proud or disturbed that I'm building something too huge for the program to render in one go.

Yasha wrote:

Hmmm.... don't we know some of that? Didn't we have a map of the campus that was labeled? I'll check around and see if I can find anything, but I make no promises. Still, thanks for the awesome pics and such, can't wait to see what you build next!

I linked Flah to that thread a while back   But yes, Flah, both the library and the culinary arts classrooms are in the south wing of the central school building near the tower, along with the music room, if the map is to be believed.  Maybe you mean where these rooms go in relation to each other?  If you can figure it out, I doff my cap to you!  I tried to reconstruct every floor of Nemuro Memorial Hall room-by-room once -- there is a surprising amount of material to work with -- and while many scenes are reconcilable, I'm pretty sure there is at least one outright contradiction.  (To which I said, Objection!!)  I wonder if the higher-traffic south classroom buildings are laid out consistently.  Look out for screen shots of hallways.  We know the music room is behind Kozue in this hallway, for instance.  And when you can track a character's movements, that's gold.  Before we had a labeled map, I figured out that the rose garden was to the south of Ohtori's main drag because it was on Utena's right as she walked back from the athletic field.

Such a huge project.  Even the research could be an act of many hours, let alone the work of laying the foundations or building on top of them!

It's been a while. After thinking things through, I've changed my battle plan a little bit.

At first, I thought it best to just set down all of the foundations before starting to build upwards. After realizing that I haven't the faintest clue how to arrange the main building, I've chosen to revise that strategy. So, construction has begun on the base of the tower and the main building. So, here is my work so far:



This is just the first stage of building the base (most of the ground doesn't exist yet). Once the more urgent projects are completed, I'll come back to it to add the other fiddly bits that you'd see in the show.

Also (though difficult to see with this lack of light), a view from inside the atrium:



I'm going to make the doorways a touch (read that as "a lot") taller and then get straight to adding the stairs and arches. Originally, I was going to keep the main building completely separate from the tower. But all of the stairs and people going back and forth suggest to me that there is a lot going on there. So the two wings will meet, making one continuous structure. From the front, it will look about the same as we see in the establishing shots. But, from the back, we'll see something that looks more like the left hand side of this shot. Boy, I'm gonna have fun recreating this one, later.

Once I get those stairs and arches in, I'll have a better idea of how large to make the main building and where to put the more important rooms, once I get to them. And then it will be a matter of finding out which locations can remain faithful to the original art and how many will need some creative rearranging. I know that the music room has to be facing west since there's no other way for the full moon to show up in its windows unless they live close to the Arctic Circle (and, even then, what's Miki doing there in the early hours of the morning?). I'm imagining that the library and movie theatre (I still can't believe they have one) will be at the very ends of the south and north wings, respectively. That way, they're free to take up lots of space while also staying out of the way of the other rooms. And the Great Curry Explosion... More research is needed.

Wish me luck that I'll be able to make this all work.

Thank you, I'm glad you noticed.

That said, I recently realized that I'd misjudged a few elements of the tower's base. Specifically, the height of the atrium was nowhere close to what it should be to accommodate all four levels of arches, as shown here.

After some additional construction and demolition, we have this:


I haven't installed the stairs or central fountain yet. Or really anything except for the facade itself. But it's at least starting to look like what you see in the screenshots.

This is all well and good, but it wound up causing another minor problem...


What you're seeing is the dome of the atrium jutting upwards into what will be the body of the tower. It doesn't seem like a huge problem, considering that the walls will cover it up, but I need at least some space in which I can place a path to the elevators. Plus, I need something in which to place those huge windows on top. This means that I will have to completely rework the outside portion of the base. With this screenshot, I think I have something to work with that will allow me to do what's needed. From the look of things, the base is actually fairly straight at the very bottom, instead of continuing to bend and twist, like what you see in the long distance shot of the school. It doesn't actually begin to curve until a short ways above the doorway. That means that I'll be able to get the base up high enough to work with the atrium while also enhancing the curve. Otherwise, the added height would just turn it into a big ugly straight line. Bleh.

So... There's more demolition ahead and even more construction. Double bleh.

But, in the end, this will make the end product a lot prettier. So I won't complain too much. Only enough.

Nobody panic! I'm still working on it! Most of my Minecraft time was spent working on getting the outer dome of the tower base to look right. Though construction is still under way, you can at least see what it's going to look like here:



I don't have the walls in yet. And you can see the vestiges of my earlier experiments with the dome down below. But the end product will be worth it.

Only problem... I'm already getting dangerously close to the cloud layer. At this rate, Akio is going to need an oxygen tank to enjoy his stargazing.