today I’d like to share with you my latest castle-environment scene.
As a history nerd and role play guy (or was it the other way round ) I always wanted to model and render a castle or bastion; all tries failed miserably, and the idea became dormant. That was, until I stumbled over the YT Channel of “sketching in blender” and their gorgeous LoR and Witcher castle renditions. So I put my nerd-pants back on, got a proper reference (probably the single most important ingredient that I lacked before) and went along. The reference in question was Caerphilly Castle in Wales, though only the basic castle shape remained in my scene.
As the blend file is now 4 GB and keeps crashing every 2nd render try, I call this finished. It’s surely not perfect, but like out it came out.
As always I’d be happy for any comments and feedback!
I love the details. Birds in the sky. Smoke from the chimney. Soldiers guarding the gate.
The castle seems a bit on the small side, but that is probably because I have been playing too much Elden Ring. But its not falling apart into ruins, and that is refreshing to see.
Ha, this looks amazing! I love how well good pixel art holds up and still looks nice after all that time, while even more recent 3d graphics look comparatively dated soon after their introduction.
Yeah well, I think is mostly my own poor maintenance, e.g. detail sculpts which are anyway not visible at that distance or unique objects and rigs for the soldiers, where linked data would have been more rational. Also, the combination of various addons that employ either data linking or appending in various combinations made the blend file a maintenance hell. Material duplication everywhere, some stuff in the file, some external in my asset lib.
The nature (scatter and botaniq trees/rocks) has actually less impact than the soldiers, which all share the same geometry but unique, not linked, as I wanted to switch out some materials for others, again something which one might not realize from the distance).
I need to definitely step up my management game for blender!
Now that you say it, it might look small. I tried to stick to plans of the castle and used the tower heights for … well, heights, but I did not include the massive outworks and the amazing dam that actually backs up the lake around the real castle. Unfortunately I’ve never visited the real thing, but I really wish at one point to do so. So cool!
Maybe its also because I skimped on modelling the back parts of the castle, and I always thought that having more structures showing in the gap between the foremost tower and the inner gatehouse would’ve added more depth. But well, as I mentioned above with the file problems I had, I was finished either way.
) I always wanted to model and render a castle or bastion; all tries failed miserably, and the idea became dormant. That was, until I stumbled over the YT Channel of “sketching in blender” and their gorgeous LoR and Witcher castle renditions. So I put my nerd-pants back on, got a proper reference (probably the single most important ingredient that I lacked before) and went along. The reference in question was Caerphilly Castle in Wales, though only the basic castle shape remained in my scene.
