My project is to create a virtual castle and its surrounding environment, such as hill sides, forests and rivers etc.
I have chosen a castle as castles are made up of many different interesting shapes. There are large flat areas (such as the walls) as well as rounded sections (such as towers). Also the battlements present an interesting challenge to model in 3d. There are also lots of small details I could include, such as weapons left lying around, doorways and windows. It also gives me a change to try to render many different materials (stone for walls, wood for roofs, mud/grass on the ground etc.).

The project will be completed in 3ds Max. 3ds Max is not a program I have used before, so throughout the entirety of the project I will be looking at different tutorials and guides to try and expand and improve my knowledge.

Below you can find my initial sketches:

(click on the images for a learger version)

Below you can see my final plan of the castle as well as a rough sketch of the environment it will be situated within:

Gant chart:


Ok this is going to be a long one. You have been warned… Oh and I need to apologise for the poor quality of the screen shots. I had the smoothing slider on 100, so there a little blurry. And of course being work in progress pictures, I cant go back and re take them. Sorry about that…

Well Ive been getting on with the castle since last week. I started with the wall (as it seemed an easy place to start). It’s basicaly a box and then I slanted the sides to make it more realistic. Next I added the battlements. The consisted of a low rectangular block and cube about twice the size that was then shaped. I then chamfered them before copy and pasting lots more.

Next was the tower. A cylinder with a ring on top that the same cube-like shape from the battlements.

I coped and pasted the wall and tower to make the basic shape of the castle. I then decided to try a bit of rendering. After using a tutorial I found, I was able to make an ok looking stone brick effect. Im not entirely happy with it and will go back and try again after Ive finished the rest of modeling.

Next I added the gate house. This was a bit tricky as I wanted to cut an arch in a cube and also through the wall. After trying different ways I merged a cylinder with a cube to make the arch shape. I then cloned it and used the boolean function with the gate house on one and the wall with the other. This cut a (almost) perfect arch thought the gatehouse and wall. I added a roof to the gatehouse. Later I will render this to look like wood.

That was about a day and a half work. At this point I wanted to try some thing else. Keeping in mind that Im building an enviroment and not just a castle, I had a go at sculpting a landscape before filling it with some trees. The trees were made with the itoosoft plugin I blogged about last week. It only took 5 minutes to create 2 groups of trees. It also has a grass setting.

As you can see, the trees dont look to bad… except for the floating trees. This is because the forest is mapped to a closed spline and has no link to the shape of the terrain. This can be fixed using the premium version, but thats €200 + VAT, so thats out of the question.

So I tried another plugin called natFX. This again is an expensive plug-in but has a free 30 day trail with a limited selection of trees.

After playing with this for a while I found that it made much nicer looking trees that the Forest plugin. The main down side was that you had to create each tree individually. Sure you could customise just about every aspect of the tree, but to make a whole forest is going to take a lot of time. Also as each tree is a separate object, to many trees and Its going to slow down my PC, and I dont even want to think about how long it would take to render…

Now I still dont know much about 3ds max and Im sure that there are ways around these problems, I just dont know what they are. If I can find a way to shape the spline along its Z axis that would be fine and I could use Forest for my trees…

The past week Ive been experimenting with 3ds max.
Not the easiest of programs to learn from scratch, mostly because there are so many different things it can do.

Ive followed a few tutorials for modeling and touched on the basics of lighting and cameras.

Also I found a plug in that can be used to generate trees. Its called Forest. It seams easy enough to make a good looking forest. That should help add some realisum to enviroment around the castle.

Also Ive made a quick sketch of one of my ideas for the basics of the castle.

Spoke with Vlad today about the subject of my project.

I explained I wanted to do a castle. He seamed ok with the idea, as long as I remember that it has to be an enviroment and more than just a building.

I chose a castle as there are lots of interesting shapes. From big flat walls to tall round towers. It could also have a moat (allowing me to experiment with water and reflections). It would need a suitable  backdrop also (perhaps set in a mountain range).

I need to do a little more thinking and research as well sketch out some ideas.

My project proposal is complete and can be found here.

Right so 4D is all about time. Time and its relation to space.

Sounds odd for a multimedia course, I know.

One peice of course work for this module. Im going to do an annimation in flash. When I mentioned it to Mike, he said it was ok. I was so shocked. I cant think of any other time and lecturer has said my 1st project idea was ok. Kinda worried he didnt unstant what I meant.

Never mind… Working on the project proposel that due for thursday.

Well almost, I got a few hours left yet.

It hardly seams like a year, its gone so quick.

Ive had a really good time and learnt so much.

The team got me a really nice leaving present, a shiney new graphics tablet!

New IP ready… Projects handed over… Guess I better tidy up my desk and get ready to go.

Well the new IP has been heere since Monday so this week I’m mostly showing him how things work and palming off work I dont want to do on to him. Its good not to be the bottom of the pile any more!

Im only joking, weve been working on stuff togeather.

Today we went for a curry for lunch to celebrate (or comisierate) my leaving. Im stuffed now and finding it hard to stay awake.

And I was given another 2 ballons. 1 was a Patrick . Unfortanatly he slipped off the string just avter we got back to work and is currently folating on the glass celing of reception. They wernt very impressed.

Next week is my last week and there hasn’t been a lot of work so Ive just been sorting things out for when I leave and preparing stuff to hand over to my replacement.

Only other stuff Ive done is design a team map, PDF the quick use guide in 12 or so languages and make the fax training more fun.

Oh, and last week I did some force ten training.

Today I moved desks.

Its only on the other side of the pod, but its nearly twice the size.

I’m lost with all the space. And I have a shelf. And my draw is next to me, not next to someone else like it was before. Though I have whacked my knees on it a few times…