Carolyn Zhang: Project 1 Castle

 Concept:

Reference Photos of Neuschwanstein Castle

Process:

    For the design inspiration to the castle, I based it on one of the most well-known castles in Europe built by King Ludwig II: Neuschwanstein Castle. The tall towers and geometric designs of the buildings with cut stones and intricacies were what drew me to this castle design. A lot of the base buildings (like the main castle area and the walls) relied on rectangular structures, so I used a lot of rectangular prisms to build the foundation. To create the many windows in the main building, I created a cylinder that has been boolean-joined with a rectangular prism to cut away multiple layers of windows in the sides of the castle. For the towers, I did a similar process with the windows and added a terrace-style window to the top most tower. Although I had planned on simplifying the design of Neuschwanstein, one problem I did not anticipate was figuring out how to snap the windows to the side of the building such that the windows will be perfectly symmetrical with one another. Fortunately, this problem was resolved after working with Rhino some more to figure out how to snap the objects to the building better.

Neuschwanstein Castle Rendered Perspective View Rendered

Carolyn Zhang's Neuschwanstein Castle Perspective View X-Ray

Appearance:

    A lot of the materials used in the real Neuschwanstein castle consisted of some form of stone/granite, brick for the walls, and a slated green-blue material for the roofing. In the inspired design I made, I also added a wooden foundation to give the castle the appearance of being like a toy or a model in a snow globe. The materials in the model followed the inspired design with stone-like materials for the buildings. I added a stone/concrete bump map to give the building a look of uneven surfacing so that the building looked less plastic, and did the same for the brick walls and roofing. When I applied the brick material to the wall, the texturing did not fit the vision I had for the castle so I changed it to look more tile-like. The texture map ended up working very well with that idea.