The Awoken Guardians of Titus memorial tombstone

From previous meetings with fellow Red hawk members, I was tasked with making a memorial in Saltaire. I then went ahead and attempted to create a tombstone which would be the standard headstone you'd see a lot in this environment. However after many days of thinking of ideas and playing around in 3D max, I had none or it was too complicated for me to design. So I went and played a view games looking for some sort of inspiration but again. Found nothing that I'd like. Eventually out of the blue I pictured this idea for one, a tombstone with a floating bit above it that will hover. I quickly sat down to draw it but I struggled to put it down to paper.

After a good half an hour of drawing down many possible ideas, I was satisfied and went to 3D max to begin. I created a cuboid and then converted it to an editable mesh, with the vertex tool I made the top of the cuboid into a triangle but then made it dip down back into the cube - which was my intentions. After that I made another cube and added a triangle at the end with the vertexes.

After making the initial design of the stone, I then added a cylindar underneath it and extruded different parts of it too make it look like steps. I then added a plane with a grass texture and a sphere for the skydome with an apocalyptic sky (intended to make it a dark fiery red but it turned out a bit pinkish) - looks like I still got lots to learn in 3D max. Anyway I added an omni to give it a nice light effect and finally went ahead and rendered. This is what I got:

After I had my desired idea built fully, I went and animated it to how I pictured it. the top part of the tombstone was supposed to hover up and down slightly. Very simple really, I just turned auto key on and made it move down till I was on frame 50, then moved it back to it's original place on frame 100.

Anyway here is the final design of it (with music and all)


www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVcGQ0cZq-4