Building - Japanese Castle

Striff

Alright, while I wait for my friggin Gnomon Photoshop DVDs to get here (which should have come today but didnt! )I made this Japanese castle.

Polycount is :

1261 Faces
3536 Tris

Onto the renders :



And the wire :



I tried to render it with wireframe and shaded, but all the wires went everywhere. Does anyone know how to render an object shaded but with wires in Maya?

Also, im not too pleased with the way the render turned out, it seems like some of the colors are a little blochy, anyone know why?

Crits and comments are welcome!

Jeff Parrott

Think like the windows modeled in is fine, but I would atleast keep it in quads. Maybe more detail though for the windows like ledges and frames. Any chance of creating a human scale reference? Helps with multifloor buildings and window sizes I've found. Also it looks like you have a extra edge on alot of the areas that you might just be able to make it a hard edge or texture that in.

Vector renderer has a wireframe mode.

JordanW

Hey i'm going to sound really harsh on this but it's only because i've been making some simmilar stuff recently so here goes:

A lot of the design of this is way off, theres a few ideas that you have right like the A frames and the slanted roofs but for the most part a lot of this is just wrong. Your windows are huge. look at this picture

http://www.pps.k12.or.us/schools-c/pages/richmond/japanese-castle.gif

you'll notice that the windows arent nearly as tall as you have on yours. Also notice that most of the shapes like the corners, the hump in the middle and the A-frame have a certain bow to them. Your angles are very rigid and with one division or two you could add a little more to this.

here's another good reference

http://www.mgu.ac.jp/~jfmorris/SendaiHTM/Webpics/Himeji.jpg

Notice on here the Majority of the bottom of this castle is foundation, it REALLY adds to the feel of these types of buildings.

You should also include some of the details on top of the roofs like the support beam running down the middle with the little statues sticking up on the end.

The little walking areas on top of the castle are also kinda funky, i've never seen that before and it doesnt look very solid, i think if you are going to try and do something like that put some support beams or something.

<edit> here's the paintover

notice i added the rock foundation, stairs, a door(!), rock drops( things on the bottom story corners) and details to the roofs, also notice the exagerration to the shapes.

Striff

Hey Tinman, thanks for the paint up, really appriciated. And good advice too Jeff on creating a little human for reference.

I can't figure out why Maya isn't letting deleting some of the edges that I could get rid of, Im pretty new to the program and am still learning it.

hawken

you might want to do more reference for this one, looks like a german town house with a crazy hat at the moment. google is your friend.