Sigrid Rittby: Week 1 Castle

Concept

I wanted to emulate Lothric Castle from Dark Souls III. In the game, the castle has lots of turrets and other aspects of gothic architecture. Since I did not have enough skill or time to add a ton of extra detail, I decided to simplify it to use a large exterior wall mounted on a hill with some buildings inside it.

Techniques 

I made heavy use of Boolean Difference to add detail to objects. I made the exterior wall using several cylinders of different sizes and subtracting to make a thick wall with a thicker top half than the bottom half. I then chamfered the edges to make a smooth transition. 

To make the turret I used cylinders and more chamfered edges with a cone on the top. I made heavy use of the copy command with various reference points to duplicate the turrets while making them consistently spaced.

I made the ramparts by making a rectangle perpendicular to the outer edge of the wall, then revolving it for a fixed angle to make a solid. I then used the array command to repeat it around the wall's edge at fixed intervals. I did a similar process for the smaller towers with ramparts at the top.

To create the archways, I created a circle curve on one face of the solid, extruded it through the solid to the other face, and then did a boolean difference to create an arch.

In order to populate the interior of the castle a little bit, I created some planes to represent streets and boolean unioned some boxes to create pseudo-buildings. I also created a market square with some covered stalls scattered through.

Materials

I wanted to use some relatively realistic materials where possible while still maintaining contrast between the different surfaces. However, I was unable to find a good soil material for the dirt underside or a good roof shingle material for the rooftops. Instead, I went with a smooth and reflective brown material for the base, giving it a nice contrast with the otherwise rough castle surfaces. I had to use a brick surface for the rooftops as an emulation of a roof tile material.

For the market stalls, I used a dark wood material for the stall surface and a blue fabric material for the stall cover.

I used a stone brick surface for the main castle structures, and darkened that material for use in the turrets. I had to make several instances of the material with different scale factors to account for the different sizes of structures.

Anna Phengsakmueang: Project 1 Castle

Ghosted

Concept
Inspired by Harry Potter novels containing details about Hogwarts castle, I wanted to base off my castle off of a few aspects that appealed to me. To begin with, the towers that seemed to be located in many corners of the castle seemed to create a more surrealistic appeal to draw the line between reality and imagination. However, before adding towers randomly in place, I also needed a basis of where to place each tower. After looking at an image of a simplified, Lego version of Hogwarts, I was able to notice the general layout of the castle. However, the style that I had desired for my castle was much more simpler that the detailed castle of Hogwarts.

Layered

Process
When creating the basis of the castle, I began with the creation of the building bases that were rectangular in shape rather than the actual towers. I wanted to be able to figure out where to place each tower while also maintaining a semblance of symmetry for my castle. When placing the rectangular bases, I had also wanted them to form a semi-circle shape. To do so, I added two smaller rectangular bases on one side and rotated one of them to act like a corner piece. Then I reflected the two small bases to the other side to maintain the symmetrical balance of the castle. After creating the five large, rectangular bases, I wanted to add a bit more detail to the castle. Based off of classic castle designs, I created structures on top of the rectangular bases to give it a more reminiscent effect. After that, I worked on the towers and kept it fairly simple. Using tubes and cones, I created basic tower structures to add more to the castle-like appearance. Since there was negative space in front of the castle, I decided to add a fountain made of truncated tubes, and tori.

No Naked Edges

Perspective Shot

Materials
For the appearance of the castle, I chose to go with a variety of blue colors accented with white. To do so, I used sapphire, diamond, and aquamarine for the castle. The sapphire was used for the towers while the aquamarine was used on the bases. In addition to the bases, an accent that helped to add a bit more contrast to the castle was diamond. For the fountain, I chose to use a liquid material that was also blue. The reason I chose blue as the main color for the whole castle, was so that it would appear more unified and that blue is my preferred color of choice.

Pedestrian Shot