Middle Earth Castle
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SketchUp -> Kerkythea -> Fotosketcher
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Seriously cool.
A really nice choice of composition, particularly for the scale of a castle.
I'd love to see other views.
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could I see the base of the castle and can I see or know how you went about flaring out the base?
good looking model by the way.
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@krisidious said:
could I see the base of the castle and can I see or know how you went about flaring out the base?
good looking model by the way.
Thanks guys, for the comments! Unfortunately, I can't show you more views because I only modeled what was necessary to produce the scene I wanted, which is unusual for me - I'm usually obsessive about details and finishing a model, but I was anxious to move on to something new.
The castle is loosely based on a sketch by the artist Roger Dean (who is most famous for doing 70's album covers for "Yes"). To create the castle, I mostly used Push/Pull and the scaling tool to taper or flare out the sides.
I decided not to start at the bottom, or the top, but rather at the first level (the mid-section of the image) and then work downward and upward. I think that was the best idea I had, because it made it easy to see where I was going and how much room I had left for the scene I wanted.
I made a flat plane that I imagined to be a horizontal cutting plane through the castle and drew the profile outline for the front and side facade that would be visible in the render. For the back, I just squared it off. Then I sectioned off the tower nodes in the outline and made them unique groups so I could extend and scale them independently. After that, it was a matter of pulling sections down and tapering them outward to make the base, and working in the same fashion going upward and narrowing to finish it off.
I left some of the edges sharp, and smoothed others out, and made a line drawing export from SU that I used on top of the render image after I applied the watercolor processing in FotoSketcher.
I hope this info helps! Thanks again for the nice comments...
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Roger Dean?! Now I see it! (I have the first edition of "Views"... if I can find it)
Anyway, good job! Looks great.
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yeah that helps... thanks. and again really kool model.
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I am sitting here next to my copy of Views by Roger Dean, copyright 1975 second edition and on the back is the UK price L3.95. And a companion book, The Flights of Icarus, by Donald Lehmkuhl, edited by Martyn Dean and Roger Dean- which is a collection of heroic fantasy and science fiction artists including Dean. Some of Dean's techniques were based on the premise that oil and water don't mix. Small world, small clock.
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