Concept
Besides the castles of Disney, my childhood consisted of the great walls of Redwall Abbey. Although not a castle in the sense that it belonged to royalty, Redwall is a fortress. It has a great strength and ferocity in its walls, but the people inhabiting it, though warriors, are peaceful and kind people. Ever since I discovered Redwall as a child, the Abbey has given me a sense of security and harmony. In order to incorporate these feelings in my model, I borrowed the blueprint of the building: the four great walls and towers in each of the corners. As I grew older I discovered the intricate world of Chinese monarchy. For all the goodness and simplicity of my beloved Abbey, Chinese Imperial Palaces were a stronghold of viciousness and intrigue. But I was attracted to the majesty of the buildings all the same, causing me to use tiered roofs in my model in a style reminiscent of the Forbidden City.
Techniques
While building my model I used the boolean tools a lot. In the beginning, I continuously used the boolean join tool to bring together the different pieces of my castle. However, at one point in my work I realized that some of the pieces I had joined would end up on different layers with different textures. So, I created a surface, aligned it where I wanted to break up the object and boolean split it. This helped me save a lot of time in rebuilding everything. The other boolean tool I used was boolean difference. This tended to be used in conjunction with the array tool. To create the repeating windows in my towers I made a cube first. Then I used the array tool to create multiple boxes that surrounded the whole tower in one go. The boolean difference tool was then used to turn the location where those boxes were into empty space for the windows. I knew I wanted to borrow the style of the roof of the forbidden palace, but I wasn’t sure how to go about building it with the regular shapes. So I drew it first with the pen and used fillet to pull it out into a 3-D shape. Finally, there was my favorite align tool. This really came in handy for making sure everything was straight. When making the roofs of the towers it was hard to tell if the tiers were straight and they sometimes moved around, the align tool helped straighten this out.
Materials
I chose bricks as my main material. Most old fashion fortresses were built up of bricks and stones and Redwall is no exception. So keeping in line with that aesthetic, my walls are red and brown brick. To give some contrast, I made the roofs out of stone. Since I imagined my castle out in an open land I found an open landscape environment for my lighting.
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