wow… that is inspiring…
thats pretty cool I bet poly is realy high alot of work on that one
MeshWeaver: Actually it’s surprisingly not that hard ;). I’ve learned a lot from my ggb project, so I’ve given everything in this project a unique/purposeful name. On top of that I split up the castle onto multiple layers (originally I was going to split up the layers I had into double the layers, having objects with ‘wall’ material and ‘wall detail’ material, however that didn’t really help). Once you’ve been working on it as long as I have, you don’t really forget where everything is. Also, I generally don’t move onto another section until all of the modeling for one section is complete. Right now I’m working off a laptop with 2.8 ghz dual core, 4 gigs ram and an ati mobility firegl v5700, however over the summer I’m going to build a desktop. The scene currently has ~421,000 verts and ~386,000 faces without any subsurf.
Lostinspace: Photo-realistic is my goal ;), however modeling first :p. Although I have recently made the roof normal map 4 times as big to prevent repetition.
Update:
Things are going kind of slow, mainly because I’m working on another project that I hope/planning to merge into this one later on down the road. I’ve updated the wall color material and the nodes, so hopefully it looks a bit “warmer”. The gold material is giving me a lot of trouble, as most things I try don’t even look close to the actual photos. Probably just a matter of time until I get it though. This update has mainly small details though. Like bumpmaps for the horizontal grooves on the main tower top gold roof and inner left fortress gold roof. Also there are now gargoyles :D, 13 of them to be exact. I need to create the two back right shields for the main tower, because I only just found a photo that clearly shows their pattern. And I’m going to have to guess on the back and back left shields. The biggest thing in this update is that the front is now connected to the back :D… well only on the right side. I was rather disappointed in it though, because I thought it was going to fit together more smoothly. It turns out that the wall was too high for the back arches as you can see (here) (large image, the wall is mirrored on both sides). All that is left now is the back balcony, the rear entrance arches, inner tunnel?, flag/cloth simulation with their guide cables (at least the curtains). Currently I’m starting to think about what else I will model, and probably the back pavement, but not the shops, and the front circle, that will include the Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse “Partners” statue. Sorry for the long read, lol.
http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/9463/rightconnection.jpg
(for gargoyles)
http://img682.imageshack.us/img682/4988/test33cropped.jpg
http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/293/test37.jpg
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Update:
Working on the back, and I’m having to shift things around quite a bit. Good news is that I should be able to keep the back entrance level with the front entrance (which I believe it is in real life). The railing is a bit out of scale, the pattern should only repeat 3 times, but it will have to do. The brick texture is a bit closer to the actual thing, not in terms of color, but bump. I also started the stained glass. I was originally going to do a texture, however modeling it allows for much more options, such as having different types of glass in the overall window. Fortunately I have a close up shot of it that I took, however I don’t know the shield pattern for all the stained glass shields. I also did a cloth simulation for the flags, however no matter what I try, I can’t get the wind force to affect it. Finally, I found a rather large mistake that I made early on. The front left wall has 4 archer holes in it, but I only had three. Thankfully this was able to solve the problem of the left tower and the right fort not being aligned.
(Oh also, if anyone knows a good way to unwrap a cone without needing to have a circular texture, that would be helpful, I’m having problems unwrapping some roofs (top left roof in render))
(~500kb)
http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/592/test40.jpg
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More back wall work. I got lucky with the door scaling, both in terms of relative size, as well as that it comes out to be about ~7 ft tall. I unfortunately have not been paying much attention to units recently, so this was a lucky break. The back wall is not completely accurate to the layout in real life, but it is close. I also fixed the scaling of the roof tiles on the back triple roof clusters.
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/3096/test41a.jpg
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amazing modeling! I wish I could do something like that.
This is just brilliant.It looks so good man,what a fantastic work, can´t wait to see it finished:)
Update: More stained glass work, back entrance staircase, back entrance gate. Ignore the roof texture scaling for now, they’re severely out of proportion in some places. Also started mapping out the surrounding park. Still need to add the inner left wall, back entrance balcony door, back entrance door, inner tunnel arches, as well as the connecting back wall between the right fort and back wall.
http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/original/36169068.jpg
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/144/test45.jpg
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/4349/test44.jpg
http://img816.imageshack.us/img816/7272/test46.jpg
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Update: Finished the stained glass, had to guess on the far right side shield and the two far left side shields. For now I just used other shield patterns in their place. Also rendered a quick turntable. (Sorry for the lurch at the beginning). I also might render a slower, hd video soon.
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Looking great. I really admire your attention to detail and patience. There’s not much of that around these days.
=D
Awesome. I don’t know what else to say!
How can I even comment on this? Its so perfect. Just. Perfect.
if you still need it, unwrapping a cone using a flat texture can be done with a real simple trick.
You just have to loop cup your cone very close to the top of the cone where it ends with one dot and then remove the top dot. now you can unwrap it as flat very easily.
you did an amazing job on your castle!
3dmedieval: Thank you :), just doing what I love.
Aikiman: Thanks for the tip, but unfortunately it didn’t work :/. The top didn’t have a connecting vertex, however the bottom did, so I tried putting a loop cut down at the bottom, but it still gave problems. I’ll just have to rotate the roof seam away from the camera for each final render, lol.
Update:
Tried sculpting for the first time, and it’s probably pretty evident ;), but I must say that the new sculpt tools being developed in the GSoC project have really made learning and using the tools rather easy. I would have posted this later with more progress, but it keeps crashing for some weird reason now whenever I sculpt Mickey. I’d also post more screenshots with matcap materials, but the one picture I have is old and was taken before it would crash when I go to the material or texture panels. I’ll have to figure this out.
I see you found the crease brush! 
on the left sleeve, it looks more like a squiggle than a crease, try sharpening up those corners.
There is a line between too much detail and waaaay to much detail. You crossed the line… And I love it.
spacetug: Actually, that squiggle is there on the actual statue, however it is believability before accuracy 
so I reworked it a little bit.
GraphiX: The best place to be
Update: Did an almost complete overhaul on the pants, so they should look a lot smoother with more intentional creases. I did work a bit on the jacket again, but I’ll need to spend more time on it. I added Walt’s tie, hands, and shirt. I also restarted Mickey completely to get around the crashing problem. I’ll come back later to smooth out his eyes more. And I must say, Mickey’s hand that holds Walt’s hand was the hardest base mesh that I ever had to make, even though it looks so simple x).
Finally I did a quick test render with the basic matcap material, so expect hopefully better looking renders in the future.
Up next is obviously Walt’s head, I saved it for last because it will either make or break it in terms of resemblance.
Update: Walt’s head.
I’m reluctant to show this, but I need some opinions. Overall the head looks wrong, but I’m having a hard time figuring out just what. All I can say is that when I rotate around the scene with his head in place, he looks really young. Some other things need fixing such as his wrinkles, but I’ll fix those later, for now I’m hoping for some help on his form. (I think part of the problem is that I started with a female head base mesh XD, however I did do a lot of proportional editing before starting).
That’s a nice real scan of the statue. rofl. Great job.
I think it’s the cheeks. Maybe have em overhang the wrinkle big a bit more? That would make him look older, as well as being more accurate i think.