3D Castle project
polycounter lvl 5
Hello, My name is Aaron Hain and this is my first post/thread on Polycount! I'm just starting an (approximately) one month project. My goal is to take this illustration/concept that I made last year and create a 3D scene out of it. The secondary goal is to keep this thread up to date and document the process (the sort of thing I'm usually not super good at)
So yea, step 1 is choosing the project. Why a castle? It's something I find myself doodling and painting a lot when I'm bored and it's late at night. It's a simple escape and something I know I can work on for long periods of time without becoming disengaged.
What inspired this piece? The references I gathered will be useful when it comes to doing more finished details, fleshing out things like turrets, crenelations (the sort of bumps on top of battlements), etc.
Here's a go-to reference tearsheet with a bunch of inspirations of castles that helped me get this far:
A lot of these are pretty well known, we have napoleon's castle from Psychonauts, Hyrule castle concept for The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker, the castle from Fable 2, Barad-dur and Minas Tirith from LOTR, "Dracula's Castle" and a couple others located in Transylvania, The Mont Saint Michel in France, Alcazar of Segovia in Spain, the famous Disney castle, and the equally famous Castle Neuschwanstein in Germany. I'm no castle expert, these are just castles that I remembered or found through Google.
Another great reference for detailing is the concept (and 3D model) of Rapunzel's tower from the Tangled movie:
Lots of great motifs and details to pull from here, and the over shape of the turret is something present in my concept.
An important question is how much detail I want in my final model? This is something I think I'll determine a little further into the process. I don't want to decide everything before I get my hands dirty.
So yea, step 1 is choosing the project. Why a castle? It's something I find myself doodling and painting a lot when I'm bored and it's late at night. It's a simple escape and something I know I can work on for long periods of time without becoming disengaged.
What inspired this piece? The references I gathered will be useful when it comes to doing more finished details, fleshing out things like turrets, crenelations (the sort of bumps on top of battlements), etc.
Here's a go-to reference tearsheet with a bunch of inspirations of castles that helped me get this far:
A lot of these are pretty well known, we have napoleon's castle from Psychonauts, Hyrule castle concept for The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker, the castle from Fable 2, Barad-dur and Minas Tirith from LOTR, "Dracula's Castle" and a couple others located in Transylvania, The Mont Saint Michel in France, Alcazar of Segovia in Spain, the famous Disney castle, and the equally famous Castle Neuschwanstein in Germany. I'm no castle expert, these are just castles that I remembered or found through Google.
Another great reference for detailing is the concept (and 3D model) of Rapunzel's tower from the Tangled movie:
Lots of great motifs and details to pull from here, and the over shape of the turret is something present in my concept.
An important question is how much detail I want in my final model? This is something I think I'll determine a little further into the process. I don't want to decide everything before I get my hands dirty.
Replies
I've always liked the minimal detail and low contrast approach the Wind Waker had with its textures, and between Owlboy, A Link to the Past, and advance wars, I've got some good inspiration for pixel art.
There's one big hitch so far: my original concept is very wonky and has lots of exaggerated, outlandish shapes. This is great for hand-painted textures, not quite as great for pixel art. Pixel art is at its best when working with square-based modules. We'll keep moving in the pixel direction and hopefully this problem doesn't hurt us too much in the long run.
To test the style out a little, i made one of the easiest modules on the sheet: a window.
This part I've done a bit before: make a photoshop texture with the 'extrusion' flattened out, then cut out the texture in maya keeping preserve uvs on
Some of the pixels are a tad warped, but this is much more expedient than modeling the window, unwrapping it, and painting on the uv snapshot afterwards.
I don't know if this is the size i want the pixels to be in my final model, so I'm going to test several resolutions after I do a blockout. That particular decision is VERY IMPORTANT. the size of the pixels determines the level of detail of the entire project, and determines whether or not you can "take it all in" at a glance, something that's very important in the original concept.
It's comparable to choosing the sprite size for a pixel art game. Theres a huuuuge difference between 32 x 32 and 64 x 64.
I did another test, this time with a quickly made roof texture and a couple of Tudor-style wall modules. The castle is going to be pretty large, so any use of modules and tiling textures would be helpful. Unfortunately, my conclusion after doing this little test is that it seems too rigid to be useful for my whimsical, wonky castle.
Fortunately, although these textures are primitive, they don't take long to make, and I've always found pixel art to be the easiest for iteration, since layers aren't as necessary and selecting values is so easy.
Another thing that's on my mind here is the overall palette. I'm trying to keep it exactly the same as it is in the concept, but part of me thinks maybe I should reign in the number of colors (at least in the shading), since that's generally good practice (and looks good) in pixel art.
I started digging into the blockout, which is probably the most important part of the project, since I'm deciding 1: how the concept's forms translate into 3D, and 2: what the backside and other obscured parts of the castle look like. Just how many turrets do I want? How much detail is too much?
None of these models are close to anything finished, but we get the idea of how things are laid out and how they look from various angles. Since modules aren't going to be terribly useful for something so wonky, we're going to have to use a lot of large textures and careful UV-ing.
After that, I made some tweaks to the blockout, so all the major modules are where I want them. The front hasn't changed much.
I did another very small test with a parapet to see just how long it's going to take me to unwrap this stuff, then UV it, then snapshot it into a texture. What I quickly realized is that exporting the UV snapshot is kind of a big deal, because the resolution you export it at determines the pixel resolution for the model. I'm trying to hold off until as late as possible to choose the pixel size, since I want to make that decision with all the info possible. Once I start texturing any of the final assets, it's too late to change the pixel size without losing tons of work.
Finally, I did some more concept work around the towers specifically. I wanted to get the level of detail correct, and also plan how I'm going to use textures ahead of time. This will make the process of creating the towers pretty easy, albeit time consuming. Now my biggest worry is large areas of geometry that make up huge portions of the castle walls. Those sections will be difficult to model and will need large amounts of room on the texture sheet(s).
Because creating the textures from the UV snapshot is somewhat time-consuming, I'm going to be very smart about where my UVs are stacked, and where they're unique. Things like wood are duplicated, things like the long tower and roof will be unique. I'm doing this without vertex color, so more unique textures for big areas will give me more control than tiling textures (gradients and such). Besides, it's pixel art. This whole tower could easily fit in one 256 x 256.
Scaling needs a little work, but the basics are there.
Everything's unwrapped with minimal distortion, but the different UV shells haven't been scaled to each other yet.
This is where it gets a little more interesting. Now all the UV shells are the right scale relative to each other, I'm using a 512 x 512 texture that's just a pixel checkerboard. (the procedural maya checkerboard doesn't work for this because I need to see the pixel size on the model while keeping the UV's in the 0-1 range in the UV editor) Remember when I said picking the pixel size was a huge decision? Well, this is where that decision gets made.
By scaling the UV shells I can change the size of the pixel on the final model.
The difference here might look small, but it's very important to pick a resolution for the texture that allows for enough detail, yet reads as "pixel art" from a distance. I'm erring on the side of making pixels a little too big for this project.
There's some nice stuff happening with the stone texture, having a tile all made up and just adding damage and windows is fun and easy. The roof on the other hand, was less successful at first. Had to remake the roof tile texture twice to get something I liked. The gains from not tiling the texture and having the whole roof unique were not really worthwhile
This texture sheet may look terrible, but as long as it fits nice on the model that's what counts.
pretty happy with the tower overall. Biggest failure on this was the amount of time it took, rest of the castle should go faster now.
The model is mostly done for the main entrance. The texture here will be lots of fun since it's a cool looking door and a bunch of sculpted stone. Model is simple, but this aesthetic doesn't need a ton of polygons to be beautiful. in fact somehow, it seems better this way.
Texture maps are starting to look like actual texture sheets. I didn't realize how rusty my 3D skills had gotten before I started this project.
One issue with both this section, as well as the castle as a whole is that the stark white look, althought pleasing and intentional, makes it hard to distinguish the outlines/silhouettes of the geometry. I'm not sure what to do about this? I experimented a little bit with simple outlines (by duplicating geometry, reversing face normals, darkening, then scaling vertices with component scale turned on), but I'm not sure this is the look I want, even though it sort of solves the silhouette issue.
after fixing some terrible geometry/normals, I got it to bake, but then I hit another big issue.
For the object, there are two sets of UV's, one for the texture, and one for the light map bake. I'm a bit of a noob with baking, so the solution might seem obvious, but here's the problem:
If the primary (default) UV set is the lightmap UV set, I lose my texture UV set, if the primary UV set is the texture UV set (with the lightmap UV's as a second set) I don't know how to tell it to bake to the lightmap UVs, and it just makes a lightmap for my texture UV set. I've tried transferring UV sets afterwards but it doesn't seem to work, maybe this is what I should be troubleshooting?
https://2dwillneverdie.com/tutorial/instant-pixel-art-backgrounds-with-the-dan-fessler-method/
So even though I haven't fixed the UV set issue yet, I do have a decent looking light bake that I can play with, so I tried out the auto-dither on a lightmap made with a softer lighting scheme (I also downrez'd the texture so the pixels would show up better).
Although the dither pattern is a bit simplistic, this is a good first step. I could see myself running this texture through a gradient map in photoshop and getting some sweet results. Not sure if this will play well with the diffuse texture I made earlier though.
Here's a side by side of part of the texture itself:
I spent some time on the backside, getting a building, a castle wall, and the little turrets at the back gate in place.
Trying to model curved walls is very difficult (especially in the pixel art style) so I just applied a nonlinear bend in the deformers drop down in maya.
This will come in handy in a few different places.
I'm running into difficulties with scale. I knew this would happen eventually, and hopefully I don't have to scale the models (which changes the pixel size) to make things work.
Anyways, here's a side-by-side of a building blockout and the final asset.
I really enjoy working at this scale because you have to be creative with how you use pixels, which is a key component of good pixel art. Every pixel counts here in order to make everything read at a glance.
I also started a couple of the main castle walls. These are probably the largest textures in the whole castle, so getting the right feel with these may take a while.
I made a little flag for the tower. It seems like a finishing touch but I just couldn't wait!
This will be a big time saver when I start making the forest that surrounds the castle.
I removed the fancy house from the lower courtyard, it's less crowded now to accommodate trees and shrubs.
This is probably the messiest stage of the whole project. Half of the modules have been replaced, and semi-finished objects are scattered all over. Ugh.
Some people are probably a lot better about keeping their scenes tidy. I'm constantly working multiple areas at once, so things kind of get out of hand. I'll clean up the outliner and delete a lot of this stuff later.
Before, to make a castle wall I used a nonlinear bend deformer. Now, i'm going to take that same castle section and apply another deformer, this time a flare. This gives me a wall section that is both rounded and curves upward evenly. I would absolutely never attempt to model something like this by hand, it'd be a nightmare.
while i was playing with the wall section i threw a poly outline on it. I'm liking how it delineates different bits of geometry (very important since 80% of the castle is white). I'm seriously considering applying this to the entire castle when it's finished.
Things are slowly coming together. The places where the towers intersect the rest of the castle will be a bit tricky.
backside is mostly finished; I'm sure i'll think of a few things to spruce it up later.
Can't believe it slipped under my radar before!
Keep it up!
such interesting style, gonna follow this for sure!
Made a couple of the towers today. I was able to make them pretty quickly.
1. model tower, paying attention to number of sides cylinder has for later
2.delete all but one strip of the repeating part
3. unwrap
4. Texture, keeping in mind left and right sides of the strip have to tile
5. Duplicate strip, set pivot to center, rotate strips around incrementally
6. done
Most of the castle is done now, save for some cleanup and small bits of texturing.
I made a gate for the backside of the castle. Didn't do this earlier because it needs alpha and I remembered maya not behaving very well with alpha. Boy was I right, couldn't get alpha/transparency to work in viewport.
was the targa exported as 24 or 32 bit? (32 is needed for alpha to work)
is alpha is luminance in the texture file node checked or unchecked? (sometimes that helps)
I started working on some ground/grass/background stuff. First I made a quick and dirty grass to dirt transition.
then i made it into a strip and extruded it to test it out
Was pretty happy with this, so I added some trees to the texture strip
This lets me block in large areas quickly, versus making a forest one tree at a time. I want the forest to mostly read as a single color anyways.
Castle was just begging for a moat, and it'll be fun to make some water textures in this style.
Environment needs more work, sky needs clouds. Not sure how many more trees I'll make.