I am currently designing my very own virtual baroque-style castle. Though, I do have references and inspiration from already existing castles (its going to have a Teutonic-Northern European look/design) which I am mixing to design my own castle my way, I don’t yet have an overall plan for how to approach to grander scales.
I know how my details should look like though, and I currently have made a round tower. I’d gladly know if someone could give my some inspiration on how my castle should look like. Its going to have a gate, and preferably a gatehouse further away and perhaps a garden or some trees around it, and it should be placed in a lake. A bit like Egeskov Castle.
The details are of vital importance here, especially the arches.
I will give away my method of brick-work and arches, using ANY brick texture. I prefer non-tileable textures, because it has more variation to it. With non-tileable textures I also have the liberty of clone-painting in GIMP my gigantic wall-textures. It gives me a lot of artistic freedom and also gives variation to it, which grunge textures cannot do propperly or at least what I want (my bricks are all of different colors, some a red, some brownish and others black, a grunge texture applied all over cannot do this trick, so far as I know of).
I started out by making a simple arch (circle, deleting half, make a window-like cut, and then extruding out to make the wall). Throughout this process, I must remember to make my Vertex Groups, ie. the wall around the arch should have its own vertex group, the arch-bricks (which are going to be vertical) likewise should have its own vertex group, and so should the mortar between the regular horizontal bricks and the vertical arch-bricks).
The arch-bricks I make using a simple plane with lots of edge-loops. I unwrap it using Project from View and use the same texture as the remaining of the wall, and rotate the UV-map 90 degrees to have these upright-vertical-standing bricks. I make 1 edge-loop alining horizontally and move it up, this to have my mortar. Remember, the bricks should have their vertex group, and the same for the mortar. As I am making perhaps 5 different arches, I name my vertex groups “Arch_small_bricks, Arch_small_mortar, Arch_small (containg both)” and so forth.
Using a Simple Deform/Bend modifier to the arch-bricks, I can control the bending.
When applied, I have a fully unwrapped arch, which I can later select its bricks and choose some other bricks on my texture for variation. Very convenient.
I copy my arch for later use, apply the bend, and join it with my wall and place it where I want it.
Then I use an Array modifier to extend the wall as I want it, apply and Project from View-unwrap the wall (not the arches).
When I have my wall as I want it, I use a Simple Deform modifer, set to Bend (maybe one should apply Rotation and Scale, depends) and bend it 360 degrees.
The roof is likewise a plane unwrapped, and bend 360 degrees, then selecting the upper vertice-row and and move them (not scaling) on the y-axis.