ICE CASTLE
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I am currently working on the concept of our next Ice Castle, 2009.
After seeing the beautiful images of Fletch in the auditorium discussion "1920s High School Auditorium Renovation", including the combo image of SU and Kerkythea, I tried the same effect with the Ice Castle.
I am still very far from being a pro of SU and Kerkythea but I like the first results.
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Hi Daniel,
Looks great. It should look even more amazing (and increase rendering time immensely) when you apply a translucent ice material. Looks like this is for the Quebec City Carnival, is that the case? -
Hi Daniel and welcome back the project - it was a fun last year, too!
Yes, it would really be nice to see it rendered with "real" ice!
What is the real scale of the castle? To me, the stone texture of the surrounding wall seems to be a bit out of scale (too big stones).
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Bruce, thank you for your comments. Indeed, in february, in evening when it snowing, the ice castle (the real) is realy magical.
Alexender, you are right. It's for the next Quebec Winter Carnaval. I'll try this week-end (if I have enough time) to do an another rendering with translucent ice. I saw on your website that you're a structural engineer in wood structure. Each year, the ice castle must be approve by a structural engineer before we begin the construction. Maybe a new branch for you (ice structure engineer). Few contracts but fun projects.
Hi Gaieus, you are right. The stone texture is not really good. To try a quick rendering with Kerkythea, I imported only the castle from my entire site SU file in a new file and added a little stone wall and some trees to complete rapidly the rendering. I'll try a new rendering with better stone texture and translucent ice.
The real castle dimensions will be approximatively 35m wide, 20m depht and 12m high and we will need approximatively 180 000 kg of ice for the construction.
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it looks very medieval! i would try a different texture, this looks too gray... i know, the whites are difficult!
slightly off-topic: in sweden and in finland they have every year a snowcastle with a hotel. it started in finland, then sweden had one and today there are so many, i can't list all of them. but here are the two original ones:
snowcastle kemi - finland
icehotel swedenuntil 2002 the snowcastle in finland was downtown, on the marketplace, but then they moved it on the frozen sea, as the town kemi is by the gulf of bothnia. check out the image gallery.
the one in sweden is by a river, and they take the ice out of it. in spring they bring the ice back to the river, this way they "borrow" the ice from nature. nice eco-touch.
i have stayed in both of them in various years, the design is always different and i must say the experience is way cool!
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how did you get the lights like that?
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I don't know if this would help, but during Christmas shopping I wondered through a Lego store. They now have molds for Lego ice cubes. It would take an awful lot to build an Ice Castle, but you might give it a try.
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thats looks cool
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