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.