Kyle Kapischke Week 1: Castle

 Kyle Kapischke Week 1: Castle

    CONCEPT

    There's a small island on the coast of France called Le Mont-Saint-Michel that has an entire commune crammed on it, complete with a massive Abbey and a wall around everything. I really like how it looks, and wanted to create a similar type of castle, where everything looks tightly packed and crowded.

 

 

Le Mont-Saint-Michel

 

     Since Le Mont-Saint-Michel is very round in nature, I decided to push that roundness and make everything circular. I also really like the multi-tier structure of the island, and went with an overall design with two walls, and several towers increasing in height. I figured modeling an entire village would be beyond me, so I decided to stylize things. Since it's more stylized, I thought a friendlier look, like the Disney castle, would work.

Ghosted

Materials

Edges

 

    MODELING TECHNIQUES

     Since everything is so circular, the cylinder tool was used for practically the entire model. Areas in the walls that bulge out were also cylinders that were moved into place, the central wall was then duplicated, and a Boolean Difference was used to carve out the exact shape into the tower portion, ensuring a perfect union without any overlap. The upper lip in the wall that adds a bit of definition was made in a similar way, except I manually made the shapes using arcs, connecting the arcs with polylines, and then using Join to close the curve. The curve was then extruded into the shape I needed, and Boolean Unions and Boolean Differences were used to combine and carve. Once the towers and tower sections were complete, I used the mirror tool and the grid to mirror into a rough hexagon. It isn't a perfect hexagon, but I think doing it that way kind of made the front of the model read better.

    For the support beams under the lips and balcony, I used a combination of the Mirror tool and ArrayCrv. The central tower was exclusively created through the ArrayCrv function. 

 

Overview

Birds-Eye View

Pedestrian View

 MATERIALS

    For the materials, I really liked how the plastic materials looked. It made it look like a big toy, so I went with plastic for the walls and towers, shiny plastic for the windows, and felt for the flags. I don't think the plastic came out well on the towers, but I really like how the walls and doors turned out.