Creating the Colosseum in Blender

So I may or may not have mentioned that I take Latin as my language course, and since latin isn't exactly spoken anymore, learning the language also entails learning a lot about Roman culture. So in my latin class, my instructor gave us the project of basically doing anything to present an aspect of Roman culture, so, naturally, I decided I would try to recreate the entire Roman Colosseum in Blender. Then, in my true lazy fashion, I decided to start the project the night before it was due. This is the photo log of that project.

I started off by modeling one arch.

Then I created an ellipse to judge how large the finished
project would be. I also began messing with the lighting.

I added an array modifier to duplicate the arches, then a
mesh transform modifier to rotate the arches in a full circle.
I messed with the lighting some more and couldn't figure out
why the arches were so grainy so....

I started over, this time adding a cube in the middle where the arena was.

Stacked the arches vertically, and began changing the occlusion type.

I added the seating, and became fed up with the current
lighting system and switched to the cycles renderer instead.
This one looked much nicer.

Finished the stairs and outer wall as well as turned up the emission
on the light. The cube along the bottom is just for me
to measure how long the stairs needed to be.

Added one last array modifier, and another mesh transform modifier

to rotate multiply the one section and then rotate

them all in to one full arena. I then scaled it on the

X axis a little bit to elongate it and

make it more of an oval.

This whole process took about 7 hours, not including the 20 hour render to make a one minute video. I would post the video, but I accidentally textured the words incorrectly, so I'll render it again in the near future and post a new improved version. I also didn't render it using the cycles renderer at the time, so I will change that as well. Oh, and for those who were wondering, I got a 95% on the project with 5 points deducted for turning it in a few days late since I had to render over the weekend.