The Castle

For this design challenge, I made a castle based on Chinese architecture. I really like the way that the roof is bent towards the sky, so I wanted to challenge myself by making a complicated shape.

I used the Jade Chamber from Genshin Impact as inspiration for this project. I took the idea of an eight sided tower from there. 

The Jade Chamber Genshin Impact

I wanted to put the castle on a floating island just like in Genshin Impact, but that proved to be very challenging, and it looked really basic and almost like play-dough

My floating island attempt:

If I used a more geometric design for the island, I could have probably pulled it off. I could have used a texture to make it more interesting, but the textures didn't render properly. This is most likely due to me working in millimeters, the textures rendered too large.

The roof proved to be a bit of a challenge for me. I couldn't think of a way to make the roof dip. I tried drawing a slice of the roof using lines and then using the revolve command to make it into a disc-like object. That worked, but the edges of the roof would be too circular for the design. Instead I decided to use the loft command and use multiple octagons to make the roof.

The beams were easier, I drew them out on the plane using lines, and then extruded it into a polysurface. I then rotated and copied them about a central point at 22.5 degree intervals to make sure that they are exactly on the corners of the octagon. Then I topped it off with an ellipsoid.

The windows were the most frustrating part of the project. I would try to draw the shape on the plane using lines and the trim command. When I tried to extrude the drawing, it would extrude the holes rather than the planks, so instead I made the planks separately from the frame and boolean unioned them together after. Placing the windows was challenging as well because they wouldn't clip to the center properly, but then I realised that I was grabbing them by the wrong point. After drawing a bunch of guiding lines, I managed to finally put everything in place.

I made the floor out of extruded circles, and assigned some colours and textures to make it look like a garden. Instead of the water texture, I used glass because it didn't show up well in the renders. Using spheres and cylinders, I made some trees and bushes. For balance, I made one of the towers into a gazebo by removing the central part and only using the balcony and supporting beams.

At the entrance, I made a stone flower :)

I hope you enjoyed this castle as much as I did, thank you for reading :)

-Ayla A.