Pedestrian View
Bird's Eye View
The inspiration for this castle came in three parts. One was the castle Prof. Scott designed in class, the next is the Hagia Sophia in Turkey, and the final inspiration stemming from the design of the city of Asgard in the movie Thor. I liked the permanence that the two latter structures gave, so I tried to convey the same in my castle. It is bottom heavy to provide the illusion of stability and it is also very large (in concept) to further purvey that feeling.
To model the castle, I used mostly the 'Solid Building' tools. the exceptions being the cutouts, which use the Boolean Difference tool, and the supports, which use the Extrude to Point tool. For all of these I used a combination of the handled curves and linear segments. Another tool I found extremely useful is the Polar Array command. This saved me a lot of time and irritation by doing most of the work. I also learned about the Gumball tool from the Lynda.com videos, and this helped a lot with moving and duplicating objects (holding the Alt key while moving).
The materials I used represent me as a jewelry designer, while the construction itself represents my love of Industrial Design. The outer wall is aquamarine, the 'nests' are diamond. I used anodized aluminum for the main structure and gold and silver for the turrets/minarets. I made the large orbiting toruses light elements, because of my love of lighting design.
