Valeria Cavazos: Castle Fall 2017

Concept:

                  The concept for my castle was to create a sandcastle on the beach and using objects that could be found scattered in the sand. The design for the castle was also created to fit a king, in this case a small crab, the King Crab. There was a general idea of how to make the castle but details were added and created as the castle was created, such as the glass pieces and the drawbridge.

Techniques:

ghosted image

ghosted image with Keyshot layer assignment

                  The sandcastle was created using mostly rectangles and flattened circles, such as the base and the main structure of the castle. Sitting on the center of the castle was created using the truncated cone tool along with the small details bordering the castle, alternating from the truncated cone and a regular cone, then copied and pasted an entire row of the alternating cones and pasted on the remaining three sides of the castle. I made the windows of the castle through the MakeHole command and curve tool, made the draw bridge using the cylinder and torus tool, and the scattered glass pieces placed onto the walls of the castle was created using the line tool and scaling it to an appropriate size for the walls. I made the crab statue by using the sphere tool, copy and pasting and scaling it until the claws and eyes were appropriate sizes to the body, then added small cones to represent claws. Once the main details were placed, I added scattered truncated pyramids around the castle to create small mounds of sand and made two triangle pieces on either side of castle, using the triangle tool and twist command to create a deformed shape to represent a shard of a bottles neck.

Materials:

                  I wanted to create a sandcastle with the objects found on the beach but some materials were not available in Keyshot, so some changes had the be made. There was no sand material available so the actual sandcastle illusion had to be made with, disturbingly, human skin material. The glass pieces placed around the castle were created with basic glass colors such as red, orange, and clear to create a variety in the pieces, while the two giant glass pieces used a scratched and waved glass material. The draw bridge used a variety of wood materials, such as ash wood and old plank wood, in order to keep the theme of items that can be found throughout the beach. The flat circular objects on the pillars of the castle were originally going to be sand dollars but there was no materials that could be used as a replacement, so they became miscellaneous objects such as using the bubble material and rose gold material. The giant crab sitting in the center of the castle was going to be an actual crab but while playing with the metals to find a material, I came across the rusted metal material and decided that it would be best to have a statue in honor of the king that has been worn down over time from the sea.