These were the choirbenches of Oirschot (2010)

Dit project was de productie van een 30 minuten durende film over de Koorbanken van Oirschot, die in 1944 door friendly fire afgebrand zijn. Het verlies van de koorbanken betekende ook het verlies van een cultuurschat die van onschatbare waarde was voor Oirschot, maar ook de Nederlandse kunst zelf.

This project was the production of a 30 minute DVD film about intricate 15th Century choir benches that burned down in 1944 due to friendly fire destroying the church of Oirschot in The Netherlands. The church interior and consequently the choir benches burned down completely which was a great loss to the community, but also one to art in general.

This project was the production of a 30 minute DVD film about intricate 15th Century choir benches that burned down in 1944 due to friendly fire destroying the church of Oirschot in The Netherlands. The church interior and consequently the choir benches burned down completely which was a great loss to the community, but also one to art in general. I was tasked from early 2008 on to remodel these choir benches as if they would have been in the church today. Eventually the church depiction turned into how the church itself would have looked around 1600. The choir benches itself consisted of all the seats and parts combined with around 90 human figures spread around, as well as a selection of mythical creatures. All of these were first modelled and later sculpted in Z-brush to incorporate the finer details. Due to lack of drawings or measurements I had to rely solely on an archive of photographs to recreate as much detail as possible. However, of some parts we lacked photographs which consequently had to be left out unfortunately. In total the model took about 2,5 years to complete next to both my studies, and was rendered in 3 weeks on 4 computers amounting to 15.000 frames. The un-smoothed model consists of 2.897.298 polygons and uses 133 texture maps varying in size from 8192px to 256px squared.