Modelling My Castle

Decided to change the design of the towers after multiple comments from friends that they were too phalic. To prevent this I added the three spiky things, to reduce the roundness, I prefer this design anyway.

 All done, and ready to start applying textures :)

I added the dome type structure to the back as I felt that alone the Kraken was too small for a very effective castle. I am very happy with the shape of my castle, I love symmetry and using not only makes things slightly easier it also goes with my theme of nature & zoomorphic architecture. 

 Heres my first tile-able texture for my castle I created it using copper panels, I mixed the levels on photoshop which gave it a really good effect. As it was my first texture I went a bit crazy with experimenting with it on every object to see what it looks like. I feel that it looks goood.

 At this point I was still quite new to maya and was curious what other materials did, I went through a few and found that Ocean Shader (OS) had a really cool effect that I may incorporate into my model. The first is just standard OS the second I played around with a glow feature. The third I changed the colour more as well as glow, this one I like as it kind of reminds me of an Octopuses skin. The last isn't an OC but the latest texture I had made, I was just experimenting to see how it looked on the tentacle.

I was curious on how to create transparent materials in maya so I researched how to create glass in maya in you tube. The above are my experiments of what I learnt, it seems like something useful to know I learnt of this youtube clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWwoBGPdKVs

Whilst Exploring I found that in rendering maya vector can act as a good way to check the colour scheme of your work.

Not to sure why the green is so shiny, but this pictures to show my door with tits bump map on, I really like the effect.

Just some examples of my bump and specular maps, I think they come out really good as long as I keep the Bump levels pretty low (eg 113). Sometimes places can come across too shiny. Theres an example of having my bump map to bumpy below.

The image above shows my tower texturing decisions, To start with I was thinking they would be gold (eg left image) and blue for a more majestic atlantean feel, however I then felt a more grungy texture would be better suited to match the copper plates of the main body, while contrasting with the stark blue bubbles of the tower. I think that I may have been subconsciously thinking of the darker style of the underwater city, Rapture from Bioshock.

The edge of my tentacle object was going within the blue parts of the tower this caused distortion in the image even when rendered I fixed this by merging the tentacle and tower together where I was able to move the vertices in line with the edges of the tower so that they slotted perfectly together thus ridding me of distortion, it was quite fiddly and took a while but was worth it.

Above shows my castle fully textured with the starts of my bridge creation, I really liked the idea of a floating bridge, which gives the idea of either magic or technological advancement. 

Here is my attempt of a stained glass window in my castle, I was trying to follow my castle concept. I am quite pleased with it, however if I had more time I would of liked to have shown a seam between the glass and metal to show where they attached and maybe made it a separate material, that could add a transparency and glow too. 

Heres an image I found in CG textures in search for circular stained glass with a lot of metal, when I found it I knew it was perfect for what I wanted, The fact that the image doesn't contain the full circle wasn't going to stop me. I put it into photoshop and after a while came out with a texture I am really proud of. I love it as it mixes my Atlantis theme with a gothic theme like I talked about at the start, the gothic stained glass I have adapted to create a pattern that resembles fish scales, perfect for an atlantean design.