The Tall, Tall Tower

[brainmuffin]

I had modeled a simple tower to test out some tiling textures I made on photoshop. I started playing around with it, duplicating it, scaling it, and sticking them on, and I wound up with a really cool looking castle design. I decided to work it into a poster for my daughter's birthday. (I used to have a sound clip of her saying, "I'm the princess, in the tall, tall tower", hence the title and inspiration).

 

The castle model is only a proxy right now. I'm going to replace it piece by piece with a more detailed model. The lighting and the background are final, for now. The lighting may get tweaked as I go along, and I may repaint the clouds in the BG, I'm not sure.

 

The BG image was done in photoshop, and the final piece will be 11"x14", rendered @ 100ppi.

 

[Caroline]

That's beautiful - she'll love it.

 

Will you have other things in it too, or just the straight castle (I mean like bats circling below, or stars or a cat walking, or some sign of the fair princess), they might be too distracting though.

[brainmuffin]

I'm going to try to show some sign of the princess in the tallest spire. I'll figure out how once I get the windows in! or maybe I'll have her out of a balcony. She won't be more than a silhouette, though. Maybe 1/4 of an inch high in the finished piece.

 

I like the bats suggestion, too.

 

There are some stars, but they might need to be brighter or bigger, maybe.

[trajcedrv]

Lovely piece, keep us posted!

[Darkwing]

How'd you do your clouds? I've been looking for the best way to make clouds, and I like yours

[brainmuffin]

Those clouds were painted in photoshop using a cloud brush that I created.Everything behind the castle is an image painted in photoshop. The moon is a real photo, though.

 

If I can find the time, I'll throw a skydome model together with some tutorials on creating materials for cloudplanes and skies. Sort of a simplified atmosphere generator.

 

In the meantime, today I did some research on castles. Wikipedia has some nice info and pics on Cinderella's castle at Disneyworld, and Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland, as well as the European castles that inspired the Imagineers to design both.