The Fantasy Castle

I’ve had this idea for a fantasy type castle piece.

I wanted to try a different workflow for it. The mountain hills were to be a type of butte style landmass like out in Arizona/Utah. I didn’t have a program, E-on’s Vue on my home computer yet, so I decided to try using World Machine to initially sketch out some land masses. It is a procedural terrain creator.

Using filters and different parameters like the “Erosion” filter you can create pretty interesting land masses that you can then export as height fields, color maps, and 3d meshes.

Now, World Machine is only available on the PC and I have a Mac. So what I’ve been very happy with is I bought a program, VMware Fusion, that emulates and runs Windows on my Mac. This has been an awesome program. I am able to work on my Mac and PC at the same time. You start it up and shut it down like its own PC. It brings up a floating window for the Windows PC OS. This has proven more and more useful as some programs I use are only available for the PC.

Once, I got several different buttes created and imported them into Maya. Using my sketch as an image plane with a camera setup, I began to place them in my scene.

I modeled a rough castle just for placement. Now I set up a mental ray sky and sun node to render out some quick various lighting conditions. I think I’ve settled on this last one.

Next Post: WIP, Part 2….stay tuned.