Floating Fantasy Castle

Castle Making in Rhino7

------------------------

Howdy partners! In this project I decided to go for a floating fantasy and steampunk-esque castle. This was my first time using Rhino7. However, a few years ago I did dabble in Voxel based software. Also, considering that I work with Adobe for my projects, I found some other similarities with that as well which helped with this project. 

Starting off I decided to make a quick sketch on the general structure and feel of the castle ->

------------------------

Afterwards, I jumped straight into it. I utilized the rectangle tool to extrude a base block. Then, using the a polygon and rectangle I lofted a swirling roof. I was kind of expecting for the surface to straightly/smoothly blend to the square rather than swirling diagonally, 

but I ended up keeping it as it was kind of fun and "fantasy" looking. 

                                           

Then I encountered my first struggle which was adding the "ribbed" detailing to each edge of the roof pieces. Initially I wanted a sort of sloped shape that you can see in my sketch. I tried drawing it out with curves, and making a rectangular box and using booleandifference to take a circle out of the piece, and other things as well. In the end I ended up taking one of the small arches you can see on the top tier and stretched it out and using the gum ball tool dragged and turned it into place after snapping to the midpoint of the edge.

To add details I added cylindrical edge pieces with circle-windows booleandifferenced out of the main shape. Then I created 2 simple pop out pieces that I could then copy and adjust to make other pop outs.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

+ I copied the pop-outs at various sizes and cut some circle window pieces into some of them, and added detailing into others. 

+ I added some circular bump outs that will act as  exterior light sources.

+ To play into the steampunk quality I made piping out of cylinders and made them connect to the pop-outs, stick out of the wall, etc.

+ To make the engine-like pieces I used the revolve tool.

+ At this point I also added on the bottom "tail" of the castle out of 2 square I lofted together to make a slight taper 

to it.

Then I added the tower. To do this I made a hexagonal base shape, and then copied over the roof and bottom "train" from the main one. Afterwards I started copying over features from the main building with a few adjustments here and there.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Then I experimented with the properties tab and focused on different material types, colours, reflectivity, etc. And I also worked out a sun angle and direction. Lastly I applied a gradient background. 

And then I was done!

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Challenges: Figuring out how to do some of the shapes I mentioned above took some trial and error but eventually I would find a solution. Also switching from PC to Mac layout of Rhino took a little bit to figure out and understand where things are in general. 

Successes: I think having that general understanding of similar programs allowed me to quickly pick up a lot of the tools. Also just generally had a lot of fun creating something like this.

Thanks!