An Early Look at Castle Vihaar

As I mentioned to my patrons earlier this week, I decided to take a short break from other work to start a 3D modeling project that I've wanted to do for years now. For a variety of purposes, I've been interested in building models of various scenes in a fantasy series I'm working on. This week I tackled an important castle. The image attached to this blog post is a rendering of the castle in a scene that doesn't match the story but at least it's more interesting than just looking at the castle with no setting. For an even better look at the castle, watch the "fly-around" animation on YouTube. Read on for a little more history regarding this modeling project.

In the past I was not able to make good progress on the model because the scale of the castle did not work well with the user interface tools in the software I'm using. It took a really long time just to move my view of the model from one side to the other. Recently, though, I learned a different technique for quickly shifting my view of the model. That gave me hope for being able to finally build a castle model. Sure enough, once I employed that method, along with using a split-view UI layout, I was able to assemble the outline of the castle fairly quickly.

There are already tweaks I need to make in the model to fix minor (and not-so-minor) errors, and I have a lot to add, but I'm happy that I've made it this far and have something to build upon when I have more time. If you're interested in this kind of 3D modeling, the tools I'm using are DAZ Studio and Castle Creator, both available from DAZ 3D. For adding it to a setting and rendering the animation, I used Bryce, also available from the same source.