Castle: In The Clouds V2


After last weeks class, I made some revisions to my castle project. I added a more structural base, and changed the way that I created the clouds as a response to critiques received during class. Rather than stretching one patch of spheres into clouds, I create several cloud structures and layered them with more intention, creating a more realistic result. 





In comparison, here is last weeks. 

In the spirit of trying to make a very unrealistic castle seem somewhat plausible, I changed the materials used in the project as well. This castle uses glass blocks as it's base, pink stucco for the towers, and in the spirit of fantasy, it features gold gilded towers, roof, and window trim. The stars use a variety of metal colours with varying roughness and texture. I struggled the most with finding a material for the clouds, but settled on using the "physically based" option, and playing around with the texture until I was happy with it. 

While focused on lighting, I wanted to play around with the way the sun's position would change the shadows present, as well as how it would interact with the reflective surfaces.

Castle at sunrise: 


Castle at noon:


Here is a close up rendering - I found the reflection of the entry on the front door interesting, those kinds of reflections were not something that I kept in mind during the design process. This close up does a good job of showing the stucco texture on the tower as well. 


Using the sun settings for lighting really changed the energy of it. 

Following those experiments, I set up three spotlights and changed the background to black. With this, I was hoping to simulate night, as if the light was coming from the stars rather than the sun. 




This lighting set up didn't quite work the way I wanted it to, so I tried a different variation, attaching point lights to the stars instead. 



For fun, I also played around with coloured lights, ending up with this pink spotlight. 

I struggled the most with rendering, as I had a hard time convincing my computer that what I was seeing in my render view should also be what I am able to render. This was indeed user error, and not my computers fault, as a couple settings changed and I had it producing images I was content with. 

Here is an image of my first render attempt. (Yikes.)


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