Kaylie Moore: Week 1 Castle

Concept

My original idea was to create a space station or floating castle. I wanted to combine the more traditional architecture and materials that one would normally associate with European-style castles with the structure of a space station or space ship. I especially wanted to convey a lack of a clear up and down by reflecting architectural elements across the x-y plane.

Techniques

I began my castle by extruding a circle to create a cylinder as the central tower. I then used the tube tool to surround it with an outer wall, decorated with a smaller tower. Once I had created the cylinders and boxes that made up the various towers, I added the roofs. The roof of the tower on the outer wall were created with a cone and truncated cone, and I used the mirror tool to reflect it over the x-y plane before copying and pasting the resulting tower at three points along the outer wall. The roof of the square tower was created in a similar manner using pyramids. For the rounded roofs of the central tower, however, I used the parabola tool, editing the control points to vary the size or height. After creating the walls and roofs, I decided to add small details such as a pipe around the edge of the roof, as well as several columns, as decoration and support. The final detail I added was the supports that connect the outer wall to the central towers, which I created by extruding a rectangle that I drew at a slight angle between two of the towers.

Materials

When I considered my materials, I experimented with both metals and other materials that one would find on a space station as well as more traditional materials such as brick and stone. I decided to use brick for the walls, stone for the supports, and tile for the roofs because I felt it not only suited the castle’s appearance better but also gave it a more fantastical or magical feeling than the various metallic materials I tried. Despite this it didn’t look too old fashioned, which was my main concern with using more traditional materials, especially after I applied a dark paint to the brick that muted its original bright red color as well as allow me to include a subtle difference between the inner and outer walls.