A castle created in Blender 2.5

Hi everybody!

This is my first post here and I hope I can learn more about Blender here. :slight_smile:
I started working with Blender one year ago and I really like it.

This is my newest project I created, hope you like it:

https://youtu.be/fU-PD9Rtte4

Please give me some honest criticism so I can improve my future projects.

The music fits the animation very well. But I would add some variation to the main bricks, and the texture from the castle. I also would texture the leaves of the tree. But overall I quite like it (:.

What rendering methods did you use? The models and textures look excellent, but everything appears a bit dark and direct.

It would be great if you could re-render one frame with more time-consuming rendering methods, e.g AO + area lights, and possibly SSS on the leaves.

Add some AO to the castle walls/floor/ceiling. UV map and bake it to save render time.

60h to render - now that’s dedication, and not bad for the scenes you have. The only “knock” I have, is the “ghosty” wheat :slight_smile: - you can always adjust lighting. Certainly worthy of a “game map”.


I’ve changed some things in the lighting so the scene is much brighter now but my problem is I don’t really know where I should place area lights (Maybe I should watch some tutorials about lighting :slight_smile: ). I’ve use AO already in the video but like in this image it’s giving me some strange results (corner beside the ladder). Is it because there are 2 separate objects?

This has a very “game textury” look to it. I agree with what’s been said about the lighting. Just adding some basic lamps around at eye level to emulate bounce light from the ground and objects will probably liven up the scene quite a bit. This is a pretty big set so you might need a lot of lamps, but it needs some light coming from the ground level to brighten it up. You can adjust the color of the individual lamps to green or brown or grey. You might also consider adding some blue colored lamps up high to simulate the sky.
The model work looks great.
You could use a little bit of beveling or smoothing though on things like the doorway.

Everything looks pain.
Try some more specular.

I agree with the comments on lighting. Overall however it is very good. Nice motion of the camera through the scene.