Brooke Hudy: Week 1 Castle

Inspiration and Concept:

    Before starting this project, I had a bunch of ideas in my head about what I wanted to make. After scrolling through Pinterest for a bit I found an image of a celestial themed castle by Alyn Spinner and I knew I wanted to create something similar. I started by sketching castles on paper to get an idea on where to start. Once I had landed on a sketch I liked I decided it was time to start building it. I wanted my castle to appear other worldly and to achieve that I made sure to include elements from Alyn's design as well as my own. 

    

North Pole, Alyn Spinner

Techniques:

    

Ghosted Render

    While building this castle I used a series of commands within Rhino to achieve my final look. From the beginning I had decided I wanted my castle to sit on a platform. In order to do this I created my shapes with "Curve" and "Circle," then I lifted my curved surface to begin shaping. To shape it I used "PlanarSrf" to turn my curve into a surface, and "Rebuild" to create control points that I could manipulate. I then trimmed my circles out of my surface to create holes, used "ExtrudeCrv" to give my circles height, and "BlendSrf" to connect the two. All that was left now was to make my surface solid. To do this, I mirrored my surface plane, untrimmed the holes on that object, and used "BlendSrf" again. From there, I was able to use these commands as well as many others to create my castle.

Overall View

Materials:

The most important thing to me while rendering my model was keeping the celestial theme. I had previously attempted to render my model with plastic textures and ended up being unhappy with the way it looked. Because of this, I changed my materials and messed around with them till I found ones I was happy with. I applied basic materials to the castle itself. Stone textures for the walls, and textured concrete for the trimmings. As far as the roof goes I could not find a material I liked so I ended up importing one. After looking around for a bit I found some window materials I liked and ended up using those as well. 

First Person View

First Person View 2

To create the galaxy look in the main building I added light emissions to a bunch of spheres and surrounded them in frosted glass to diffuse the light. I ended up liking the glow of the spheres in the low light so I added light emissions to my stairs and statue in the front as well. Lastly, I had added a shiny tile material to my bases out of curiosity and ended up liking the way it looked so I kept it. The lighting for the scene is simple. There basically is none outside of the spheres and stairs, but I added a low light environment to make things more visible.  

Birds Eye View