XVIIth century castle

[CaptainMarlowe]

Hello to all.
In parrallel with my castle near Saint-Malo, I have started to work on a XVIIth century castle, as many were built after Richelieu ordered every private military castle to be destroyed.
This one is inspired by the castle of La Motte-Tilly.
Here are some wireframe renders of the main building. There are currently around 220k polys (among which some undesired polys around the windows, remnants of ancient windows that I have deleted and replaced with new ones).

[SMFloris]

I think it's the model is great, i would love to see it textured ^^

[CaptainMarlowe]

Hi and thanks. Here is a quick first try, but that needs some serious improvements.

[ArtGoblin]

That's some sick modelling skillz dude! Have you tought of baking the roof tiles into an normal map instead of geometry, seems unnessesary detailed unless you plan having your camera hidden between two rooftiles

Ohh.. and textures looks really good so far, would love to see something like this rendered in an evening/night setting... like a ballroom dance happening or something so that all the light's would be on inside

[CaptainMarlowe]

I had thought of creating a normal map, yes, but I've never done that before, so it might take some experiments to achieve a good result...

[ArtGoblin]

In theory it should be very easy to normal map those tiles... at least compared to normal mapping a more organic surface... like a character for exsample. I've actually never done normal maps in LW... but it can't be that different between packages... just model the lowpoly geometry and make a good UV map for it, then somewhere in layout you should be able to bake the normal information of the HighPoly object onto the lowpoly version, you could also bake all other texture information to a map as well. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take you long to figure it out if you found a decent tutorial on the subject

[CaptainMarlowe]

I've found a tutorial on that. It's just that I've never tried before. A good time as any to improve my knowledge !

[tobian]

Looks very good as usual, and yes a Normal map might indeed do the trick here, though it could be quite tricky to bake it all!

[CaptainMarlowe]

Yes; it may be a bit complicated. On the other hand, global polycount for now is just 220k polys, it's not that excessive.
I'll try anyway to create normal maps for it is a good challenge, but that's not my top priority right now.

[tobian]

If you can crack the nut it could be quite a cool tricky as you could use a normal map set to repeating, if you can design it well.

That's not too excessive for poly count though.

[CaptainMarlowe]

I have been thinking about the normal map thing. I think the best would be to create the geometry of a square tileable part of shingles, then convert it into a 3D-Coat brush and simply paint it on the roof. It should create the normal map for me without too many hassle.
And thinking of it, I could create bricks normal maps for the walls the same way...
OK, that may be the lazy way, but, as long as it works, who cares ? I'll give it a try a soon as the gardens are finished.
As long as the overall polycount doesn't crash or freeze Layout, I'm not in a hurry to go for a normal map. And since, for this scene, I don't intend to use HD Instance for the moment, I can run Layout in 64-bits mode.

[CaptainMarlowe]

Well, it seems to work... well, it should work with some patience.
I created an object with shingles (but didn't bother to make it tileable).
I thene xported it in .OBJ and imported this .OBJ as a brush in 3D Coat.
I brushed it on a cube with different sizes and depth.
Then I exported the cube to lightwave.
Below two renders, one withour the normal map, the other one with the normal map.
I guess the only difficulty is to create a real tileable sample of shingles, now...

[ArtGoblin]

hmmm... it looks like a smoothing error in the normal map... I've never used 3dcoat... but I when baking an highdetail model to a lowpoly mesh, it's good to have the normalmap material/shader/surface set to an extreme smoothing, say 180 degrees? it will look way off without the normal map, but it seems to make eliminate a lot of smoothing errors on the normal map itself and makes a cleaner map as well

[CaptainMarlowe]

yes, the smoothing was set to 0... It does need a lot of tweaking, but the principle seems to work.

[CaptainMarlowe]

Here are some updates.I started to work on the gardens, allthough there are still an awfull amount of details missing, like for instance dependancies (barns, servants housing), an exterior theatre, water animations, etc.
A lot of work on textures awaits also.