I have been on a castle kick lately and there is a purpose behind it. I am making an effort to develop the skills needed to create large dramatic scenes in Blender. This piece and my previous post are part of my effort to get there.
The terrain bits are all from Megascans while the rest was created using Blender 3.5. All lighting and comp was also Blender. I have my own opinions about the final result, but please share your thoughts!
Night Variant
Night scenes can be tough. This one looks great on my primary good monitor, but not so hot on my others. Experience may vary The primary sky lighting is just a gradient and noise texture mixed together with a ton of point lights for the lamp lights in the town.
Thank you! I have a long standing concept which involves a lot of symbolism that will revolve around a fortress/tower of some kind, so I have been working on scenes that develop the skills I need to accomplish it. That is sort of the inspiration behind this and my last post. As far as reference, I basically pulled a bunch of castle photo reference from an image search for realism, while also starting a collection of more dramatic works on Artstation that help me with the artistic side of things.
very good, but my eyes can easily recognize if it’s not the real scene, maybe because the sky is too flat there are no clouds or maybe because of the lighting or maybe also because of the reflection of light on the building I don’t know.
Looks good, but the night scene window lights needs work. It looks like you’ve made them all the same color and intensity. Is a medieval castle really going to have lights on in all the windows? I’d imagine them to be lit by candles, so a softer warm lighting is expected.
The lack of atmosphere in both version leaves it looking a little stark.
It’s funny you should mention the windows. A coworker of mine recommended that very thing as almost his first criticism, and I tend to agree. I am also not happy with the extremely light atmo level. I was having trouble with the fade and unfortunately ran out of time to wrestle with it anymore seeing how it is just a personal piece. I’m actually glad you mentioned two aspects of it that I was not satisfied with. Means I am aware of the right things needing improvement!
The primary sky lighting is just a gradient and noise texture mixed together with a ton of point lights for the lamp lights in the town.
That was not even among my reference images. Kinda crazy. Minas Tirith was probably an influence whether it was there or not