Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2123611

Just finishing up a long night of modeling and spending some quality time with my 'puter again, I've been away from it for a few days. I was beginning to lose hope in humanity, faith in my fellow man, and love for myself. But now everything is fine! I took to heart some of the advice and ideas some of my favorite 3D-ers had to offer, and came up with this mess. Is this any better? Any new ideas to go along with this before I get ready to export the whole mess into Bryce and Maya? I still need to add a few doors along the wall, and also of course run the sidewalls. Some flags, banners, and torches of course... Any comments, critiques, or suggestions would be very welcome! (the link goes to the previous thread about this project...)

And a solid close-up of the perspective, less messy...

very very nice! i definetely love it

Methinks the side (tower) entrances don't fit the angular, hard-chiseled look of the rest of it. Still missing a couple of walls and stairwells and such, but the more I look at it... 183,000 polygons total, and that's before any optimizations in Rhino... I'm thinking I could fit a good twenty of these into a scene at my current RAM levels....

Message edited on: 02/23/2005 07:57

you can chisel the side entrances, but i consider them pretty interesting -even though i don't think a normal castle would have them (the idea being of strictly controlling access points, the fewer, the more easily defendable). otherwise i think it's all very interesting. the more i look at it i might also comment on the top ramparts (if i got the technical term right, basically the tops of the 2 side towers that seem a bit too wide for the tower to support. but i still like the design and the modelling :) drac

183000 polys - thats some size. Main thing I notice are the battlements on the centremost tower (above the main gate) are a different size to those on the other tower tops... may want to consider making them all the same size. I like the curved look of the towers above and each side of the smoother looking gateway section of the wall - to me, the side entrances to the big towers seem to match up better with the curved look of those gatehouse towers but do look a bit out of place on the very angular big towers.

Aye, Flak, I see what you're saying about the angles and curves being a better match. 183K polys is nothing, though. The other tower, the one in the link which we discussed before, had well over half a million polys by itself, and it was (to scale) 1/10th as large...

Did anybody notice, every time AgentSmith dissapiers, Flack shows up, I'm starting to think they are the same person !!! :P

Anyways, LSD, that is a nice looking model, lots of polys, hope you gonna be able to optimize it to at least 1/4 of it, so it want take ages to render, lol :)

That pipe job above entrances on the left(and right) for some reason does not strike me as a best possible solution, maybe it should be more square, dunno, regardless, like I said, it is still excellent model, looking forward to see the rest of it ! :D

Attached Link: Rhino meshing strategy

Here is a link to the best meshing strategy I have come across. It has worked wonders for me. If you input values into the min and max edge length you can get Rhino to spit out almost 100 percent quads. Check out the picture at the BOTTOM of the post. Great looking castle. Saving in UV Mapper without the normals will cut your model in half. You will have to smooth inside of Bryce though.

Fabulous, not traditional and so not like anything I have seen which is just what you want from a fantasy fortress. I would leave the over-wide tops of those towers as they are, or at least don't narrow them down too much or they will lose their unique character. I would though, have only one entrance or at most two, a fortress should be credible and unless it's a whole fortified city it would be very unlikely to have more than one gate. Look forward to the finished item.

Is this supposed to be only one wall of 4 or more?

Yep, looking good. But I'd bet you the small entrances have more polys than the top of the big tower. :-/ The thin pipe is probably the main culprit. And it really doesn't fit there, looking out towwards the enemy. I don't know whether you've already tried something like the thing on my pic, but it results in much less polys. Instead of a circle for a tube, use an octagon or even hexagon in some cases.

This is looking great SDL! A bunch of these together would make a most impressive render. However, I do have to side with those who have previously mentioned the diminutive crenellations on the middle tower(maybe they have a company of hobbit archers?)and I also tend to agree that the less gates in a castle to defend, the better.

Message edited on: 02/23/2005 15:30

Yeah, 183,000 polys to me is really much ado about nothing, but like I said, that was before any optimizations. My "Black Tower" was all Brycean, and it was much, much more poly-intensive. But Erlik makes a good point, the only real eaters-of-polys are the silly sweep1 surfaces and polysurfaces... Gonna get rid of them and change the tower side-doors around a bit. Tresamie, I'm not certain where this one will end up, but my guess is that considering how few polys are involved (my original plan was for less than 250,000 for this section) I'm thinking about something ridiculous. I'll keep you posted. GG, thanks for the tutorial link! And thanks, everyone for the input... Here's a quick (2.5) hour render using fake GI and some other silly techniques... (Bryce)

Attached Link: postern gate

Kemal - my hair's shorter ;) edit - on the gate number thing, a lot of castles and fortresses had things called postern gates dotted around their perimeter (apart from the main gate(s)). These were smaller doorways that were very hard to get through and provided the defenders with small exits through which they could launch small counterattacks to keep an enemy off balance that weren't so obvious as the main gate opening to let people out. Also could be used for messengers to try and get out through during times of siege. The link goes to an example of one.

Message edited on: 02/23/2005 19:03

The thing is this seems to me to only have one gate anyway, those other entrances are, unless I am seeing it wrongly, internal doors to the defensive towers, they don't go all the way through the wall. Anyway as a fantasy fortress it looks good, original and reasonable polygon count, and if it will be going free I'll want it that's for sure.

Nice!!!

great render lord