This castle started out as a simple exercise but as I got along, it became more ‘serious’. I’m a Blender newbie (and cg newbie in general), but I liked this piece just enough to post it here.
The castle was based on the following picture of Maybole castle:
… but hold on to your horses: I never meant to entirely recreate it. I used this picture as a guideline for the meshes and didn’t refer to any other Maybole picture. What I did want to capture was the nice yellow sunlight on the bricks you sometimes see on cold, beautiful winter days. Hence, I added some leafless trees to enhance that feeling.
Hey, that’s very good! Fine modelling and texturing, in my opinion. I guess you could use more shadows, a different camera angle or something though, looks somewhat flat.
Very nice, I think that your model actually looks better overall than the real picture, it is a lot easier on the eyes. One crit that I need to say is that the balcony-thing dosn’t blend well with the rest of the castle. I would recommend putting ivy or something else on the wall with the 4 windows, it looks kinda blank right now.
Very good texturing and modelling!
Good luck!
Looks sweet man. One thing I’d suggest is change your antialiasing filter or bring the filter size up so the rendered stuff is sharper. Looks sweet though, keep it up.
Very pretty and calm, a lot better texturing than i could do.
I agree with funddevi though, the four-window wall is a little plain. On the other hand, that’s what the real one looks like, but if you leave it plain I’d suggest adding the smaller building on the left.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.
Actually, I agree with most of the crits. Some changes I think I can implement, others will need some further learning.
@ Crititrozoz: your reply finally got me to look into those different OS filters. I always used the default Gauss filter (1.00) for all my renderings. I used CatRom .90 now and the result is great! That I didn’t look into those filters earlier! But the sharpness also reveals some minor texture issues though.
The balcony thing not blending in, some blank textures and too little sharp shadows were indeed some issues with the render.
@ Mats: The sky is just a simple photo. I was thinking of using particles
(using this interesting tutorial from Colin Litster: http://www.cogfilms.com/CQTs-5.html) but then I thought: heck, a pic will do the trick for now.
I will probably post a new render later when I implement some more changes.
FrankC,
Thanks for that link, I had completely missed those tutorial. Matter of fact, I spent the entire day yesterday trying to animate an ocean - if I had only known about that tutorial!
And thank you for those wire frames, you now have a home in my reference folder.
