After nearly two weeks of working on the pedestrian zone tower in my spare time, I am happy to say that I finally got it finished. And here is the final product:
Not bad, considering that I have no 3D art experience at all and am pretty much self-taught on Blender and GIMP, the two open source platforms I used to create the tower model. The source of inspiration for the tower is Das Obertor in Bad Camberg. Not an exact copy, but fairly close:
Most of the textures I grabbed off the Web, although for the sides of the tower and the passage I found some high-quality textures at Arroway Textures. I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am with the textures I found there. Although I grabbed a few to test them out on this project, I’m most certainly going to purchase the some of the CDs they offer on their site. In the coming days, I will post a video of a turnaround render, a FRAPS of how the model was put together, and a few other things.
David Neville, PhD, MS 
