Medieval Castle

[gallifrey_falls]

Wow, thank you @Anthony_Forwood That’s the best compliment I’ve had on my work!

More grunge. I’m almost finishing with dirtying up the castle, but there’s now definitely some repetition sneaking in, and a few stretching issues that I hadn’t noticed previously so I’ll have to fix those with UV editing.

Next will be on to finishing up the main doors/gates. I’m also starting to get ahead of myself a little and considering expanding the castle to include multiple layers - depends how long I’m furloughed for as my aim is finish this project before I go back to work.

[gallifrey_falls]

Put off doing the gates until tomorrow and built a bridge instead to go over the moat that will eventually surround the castle.

Edit: Fixed some UV stretching and lowered the bases down so there’s actually room for the water.

[gallifrey_falls]

Been playing around with expanding the castle, and went a little mad with Shift-D. Expanding the castle has also let to a rethink of the environment and landscape. My idea is to have it sitting behind a river set into the side of a mountain.

I know the look of this render is awful, mostly because of all the bounce lighting coming off the untextured environment, and there’s all sorts of UV and texture issues with the duplicated walls and turrets. However, I would appreciate any thoughts on the size and composition of the castle itself.

[Raikuzu (Victor Delgado)]

holy molly! that’s a huge scene you are creating! love the medieval theme btw!

at first glance it looks pretty decent to me when it comes to scale. I would try to focus now on the terrain and the environment itself to see what kind of materials and lighting goes along with the castle. And keep in mind the little details (flags, windows, torches) on the walls, those might prevent repetition and keep the eye of the viewer interested in the scene!

I am also creating a huge scene myself based on a roman camp, and I totally forgot about the polycount and memory usage and now I gotta make it again (at least part of it) cuz my graphic card could not render it.

[gallifrey_falls]

Thanks @Raikuzu! Yeah the scene and castle is huge. I always model everything using real world measurements, regardless of how big or small. The Castle itself currently stands at over 80 meters tall, and the environment is a rather silly 4km wide!

My current method is to work in layers, doing the bigger stuff first and then getting into the smaller details later. I think if I’d kept the castle to the original size I’d definitely be doing that at the moment, but instead I’m now back to the blocking phase with the larger sized castle/fortress as it’s becoming.

I’ve started working on the environment and landscape, however I’m struggling a little as I’ve never really done nature work before and finding it difficult to get anything that even comes close to matching the realism of the castle.

As a break from that I’ve finished the main outer gate.

As always - any feedback or comments is greatly appreciated.

[pitibonom]

All this is getting bigger and bigger

Congratz !!!

I’d say all this is beautifull ( though still too ‘clean’ IMHO ) and apart some unconsistencies on the scale of various parts, and also some others for stoneworks building techniques, i can’t wait to see lit renders of a full scene with haze and light scatterings

Happy blending !

[gallifrey_falls]

Thanks @pitibonom, I’m loving your updates on Carcassonne as well.

You’re definitely right that there’s some texture scaling issues, especially on some of the archways and pillars, but if you could point out any specific areas you’ve noticed that would be great, also I’d appreciate it if you could expand on what you mean by stoneworks building techniques.

Latest render is of the interior courtyard, which will be behind the main front gate, as well as an updated look at the bottom layer, including battlements and more turrets.

[pitibonom]

Sorry i think i was unclear

Talking about the ‘scales’ i pointed the towers and wall battlements.

in the following pic:

and according to the previous pics you posted with a toon in front of the castle gate, we can clearly see the battlements sourrounded in green are of the proper scale.
Aside this, the battlements surrounded in red look far too big.

Military achitects used to create battlements of 2 to 2.2m high for the merlons and 0.8 to 1.2m for the crenelles.
Making higher and bigger merlons would have been, aside beeing a waste of stone ( wich was a precious material at this time ), pretty unconvenient and asking for larger crenelles not protective enough for the castle defenders.

Though there are different battlement architectures along the ages, merlons and crenelles had a corresponding length of 2 and 1 for romans, up to 4 and 1 for later buildings ( like some in Carcassonne )
I guess there are many theories on this and many books written, but if you want some academic info for starting digging on this, you might be interrested in the french of XI to XVI century architecture from Eugene viollet le duc.

https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_raisonné_de_l’architecture_française_du_XIe_au_XVIe_siècle

I don’t know wether or not there’s an english version of this though

For the building techniques problem i saw, it’s just a matter of static mechanics applied to buildings.
Arches, always arches and only arches were the answer at this times

For example, this:

in red, this long piece of wall laying over the void and carring arches over it, cannot exist.
This kind of ‘encorbelled’ ( not sure of the word though ) needs something under it for the weight charges to get down to ground, or at least it needs corbels.

Sorry am not familiar with all the english terms but if you need more info, i’ll try to find you some pictures

I really love your stairs.png and door1.png.
Your textures are really amazing !

I really love all your work @gallifrey_falls !
Keep it up

and happy blending !

[pitibonom]

Oh and, at last but not least

One important thing about medieval castles:
All that had to protect from enemy’s heavy weapons was made of stones.
But most of the stairs and structures allowing defenders to access their defence point were made of wood.
The reason for this was that it was cheaper and faster to build than stone structures

Hope it helps ^^

[gallifrey_falls]

@pitibonom Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, that’s really helpful! Usually when I model I’m quite particular about using real-world dimensions wherever possible to ensure realism but for some reason I completely forgot to actually look into how big real battlements were.

I’ve taken this into consideration and tried to keep all the battlements to a 2:1 ratio - even numbers are easier to work with.

Latest update is on the side of the first tier, I’ve built in several sloping layers so that it enables access for carts, wagons, horses etc (apologies for the noisy render - I only do 32 samples for test renders to save time)

I’ve also made some relatively low-poly buildings that I can then populate the main street with.

[gallifrey_falls]

Took a quick break from the architectural modelling to work on some characters to populate the scenes once it’s all finished.

These won’t be anywhere near the foreground as they’re extremely low-poly (600 per character with a 512x512 texture) as you can very clearly tell from the 2nd image, but as background characters I think they work pretty well.

I’ve set the shader so that it randomly generates one of 4 different clothing textures for each instance to build in some variation. This is only the men at the moment and I’ll probably do the same for some female characters as well.

[gallifrey_falls]

A better view of the side of the lower tier, and a view from the street. As always any comments or critiques are welcomed.

[Anthony_Forwood]

The clutter of building detail in the street view knocks my socks off.

One little thing that bugs me when I look at it is that column of stones to the right of the doorway there in the front of the scene. They don’t mesh with the stones of the wall and they’re not scaled the same.

How many verts are you at and what sort of memory usage are you gobbling up?

[gallifrey_falls]

@Anthony_Forwood, thank you and good spot on the columns, I’d missed that. I’ve fixed the scaling issues and re-textured it to be more grungy like the rest of the building. I’ve also added a door.

The whole castle across the three layers is currently at just over 1.5 million verts, however that is without any of the doors, stairways, windows and there’s no booleans on the walls or turrets to cut holes out for them, all of which will drastically increase it.

I’m expecting that the final castle, will all the doors and details etc will probably come in somewhere around the 3 million mark, which may be an issue as I’m not sure my computer will be able to handle it!

For memory useage, I’m clocking in somewhere around the 2GB area for renders, and around 750MB for general working.

At this point I’m happy with the lower layer and going to start working on the second level.

[Anthony_Forwood]

That’s not a bad vert count for the size of that. About the same as my largest projects.

What do you have for a system?

[gallifrey_falls]

It does help that I’m consciously optimising everything were I can. When I started I had loads of extra edge loops and bevels, but as as it’s grown I’ve had to go back and strip it all back as much as I can.

My setup is awful and outdated, I’m running on an ancient laptop with a 1.5GHz AMD A4-5000 processor with integrated graphics and 8GB of RAM.

I was planning on buying a desktop with an i-7 9th Gen processor and GTX 1660 GPU but then the entire world went mental and I can’t really justify spending a lot of money at the moment.

[gallifrey_falls]

Been working on the big cathedral-like building behind the courtyard and in front of the keep on the second level.

[3dmedieval]

Looking great. Love how it’s gotten dirtier. I’m a castle builder too. Not to hijack, here’s one of my recent completed projects:

Castle Building Set

[3dmedieval]

Looks amazing.

[pitibonom]

nice one @3dmedieval !