Object Design week 3: The sky castle

every time i have an opportunity to create something from the comic i'm creating i take it, which is exactly where this castle came into play.

this is the rough sketch I based my design off of, though it did end up looking rather different in the final. I used the loft tool to create smooth connections between the towers, as well as create a rounded, sloped roof

the biggest roadblock I found was creating the halo-like structures that circle the castle. I originally tried to use flow, but eventually realized it wouldn't work for the curved roof, as it only works on hollow objects. instead, I opted for a hole-punch style of creation. 

i started by creating a larger structure of the roof that was about a millimeter in thickness. for the smaller halos on the roofs, I punched out of the middle of the object. for the larger halos, I added a cylinder at the bottom so there was more room to work with. I then used Boolean Difference to cut the pieces out .

i used a copy of the object and a good bit of Boolean difference to create the connecting ring. after i had my peices cut out, I used Boolean Difference to create the pointed ring from the cut out object. 

after creating one castle structure, I duplicated the towers and centered them around a ring. to create even more halos to decorate the structure, i split the end of roof halo using Boolean difference and flipped the flatter cylindrical part.

I used a desaturated pink background to create contrast within the structure. the goal was to make the castle look like it was made out of gold and porcelain. I used the metal texture for the gold, and the high gloss paint for the porcelain. i then played around with different lighting angles to make it believable that the castle was floating. 

overall, the castle looks like something straight from a video game, which I am beyond happy with. creating the rings was certainly a challenge, but it was still rather fun to figure out.