210 Castle Project: The Librarian's Keep

I did not know how to start this project, but after pondering for a while, I thought it be best to go out of the conventional views of a castle and with that also to push myself and see how complex and detail orientated I can get. Thus begins the ideas for a floating sci-fi castle/keep structure with a side of painful waiting times and struggles for the past 4 days.

Started off with a couple of sketches as to the shape and the form I want to end up with. I wanted to keep some aspect of a castle so I decided to take up on some gothic architectures for the arches.

[Initial sketches of how I want the Castle to feel and just getting down general sizing and proportions]

After Sketching, I started working on the first layer of the keep.

For this bit, I used Polar Array, Bend, Extrude Curve, Extrude curve along curve, handle curve, boolean union, boolean difference, & mirror. Took a while and struggled with handle curve and extrude curve along curve, but after a bit of trial and error I got it down to the shape I wanted.

Then I started working on the base for the first layer.

Some general extrude curve, polar array, and offset for the base plate.

Then added on some little spinny boiz using extrude, loft, bend, and twist to get the form. And then finally using boolean split and boolean union to connect all the columns together.

[Aerial view of the first layer]

After that started on the Second Layer using the functions of scale, bend, twist, extrude, loft, boolean difference and union.

Then after finishing this, going along with the idea of a Librarian's Keep, I started making these "database prisms" and had them go around the entire perimeter of the second layer. These columns or prisms, I used the following functions: Extrude, Boolean Split, Boolean union, Rotate 3D, & Mirror.

[Schematics for the embossing for the prisms and then mirrored the final prism form to create 4 other different styled ones]

[Final completed arrangement of each prisms, using gumball to give each one varying height]

[View with the previous layer and connected prisms with boolean union and then the centerpiece]

With the main interior centerpiece completed, I started working on the floating island. and with a low poly shape in mind, I created the entire landscape manually to create a unique landscape. Thus it required alot of clicking for points, surface corner points, lines, gumball, and polar array. Most of these points have a difference in height.

[Top view and perspective view of the landscape]

At this point, my computer was chugging really hard, so I don't have any process photos of the landscape and the ring/bridge itself and also because I was using the school computer but I then used the following functions: Explode, join, boolean union, stretch, scale 1D, Bend, Polar Array, Mirror. I had to use explode because for some random reason there was something conflicting with the landscape and the centerpiece itself, so I had to remove some parts here and there and replaced them in order for them to connect again.

And thus here is the final piece with a whopping number of 46616 surfaces after struggling with this nonstop with tears of pain and more pain because of the bloody boolean union and join functions killing me nonstop. I also used directional Lighting just because the render blended all the details together into a giant blob. Yikes. But the following photos are just aerial shots, perspective shots, and also some interior shots. That concludes my blog for this and now I shall catch up on my sleep for the first time in a while. Gubi. I hope to never do something that kills my computer.