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[nenjin]

Moving right along...

After many hours spent wrestling with the the Terrain Feature, I've gotten mostly what I want. The overall picture of the Castle now should show you why I say mostly.

Spoiler: One of these things is not like the other... (click to show/hide)

I have no idea why Sketchup made one terrain (composed of several smaller terrain grids) smooth, while the other I've made on the right still shows lines everywhere. If anyone knowledgeable with Sketchup has an answer, speak up! I've done the Smoothing thing to maximum effect but it's not made a difference.

Despite how eye gouging the lines are I'm not going for video game perfect presentation. It just annoys me that I don't understand what rule I've broken that makes it not look as pretty as it could. The amount of effort it took to make the graveyard, with paths going in between bits of terrain, should have been small. It turned out to be a major hassle because of how finicky, and unpredictable, Sketchup gets when you start working with terrain around lots of complex structures.

But enough of that. I mentioned a graveyard, so here's the guts of it.

Spoiler: Castle Cemetary (click to show/hide)

Dracula offers great deals on family plots. It's also conveniently located adjacent to the Execution Yard, for all your quick burial needs.

A mausoleum and plenty of gravestones (which I'm sure the Model Library has many of), some dead trees and I think it will be down right homey. This is actually only part of the graveyard, where all the staff and guards and minor nobles get planted. The more upperclass, fancy graveyard will be behind the Cathedral.

Also, I'm looking for suggestions. Notice that empty section in the upper left, next to the maze? I've no idea what to put in there.

I've got a few ideas. Like a crazy garden of evil or perhaps a lake. I'm leaning toward the garden because the lake somehow doesn't seem like it fits; it's crammed into some convenient location of the castle. Maybe a pond is more appropriate than a lake with a boatmen.

Anyways, I'm open to suggestions on it (or other areas people really want to have included I suppose.) I'm reaching the point where most of the real-estate of the castle exterior is now covered. Then I will begin hardcore detailing, such as windows, crenelations for the walls, and probably a redesign of some towers.

[MaximumZero]

Garden of Evil/Boneyard. Trees made of bones dripping blood and flowering eyeballs. Dark red grass. Broken, overgrown paths. Guarded by giant skeletons and the ever-present giant bat.

Failing that, you could always put in Olrox's Tower. ^_^

[nenjin]

Failing that, you could always put in Olrox's Tower. ^_^

It's already allotted for, more or less.

Spoiler: Mausoleum (click to show/hide)

[MaximumZero]

Failing that, you could always put in Olrox's Tower. ^_^

It's already allotted for, more or less.

Spoiler: Mausoleum (click to show/hide)

Ooh, shiny.

You could always put in an entrance to the underground, too.

[nenjin]

Spoiler: How about a little mood lighting? (click to show/hide)

Sadly, you can't set the angle or direction of the sun in the free version of Sketchup, so I can't manipulate the shadows for maximum 'Vania.

[Djohaal]

If you can export this into .3ds I can try rendering it on a better engine

[mendonca]

Spoiler: How about a little mood lighting? (click to show/hide)

Sadly, you can't set the angle or direction of the sun in the free version of Sketchup, so I can't manipulate the shadows for maximum 'Vania.

You sure about this?

Try windows --> shadows --> tick 'use sun for shading' ... manipulate time and day ...

[nenjin]

Yep, I'm sure. You can set what time zone you're in, time of day and a few shading properties. But you can't grab the sun and swing it around the horizon where you want in the free version. Which sucks because I remember being able to do it back in Google Sketchup 6.

[nenjin]

Enjoy the night...

So while I mull over what to do with the remaining space, I prettify things further.

Spoiler: Dracula to Masons: MOAR COLUMNS! (click to show/hide)

I'm unsure if I like the effect or not. At times it seems good, and at others it seems too crowded. What do you guys think? Here's a version with less colums:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Which looks better?

I'm fairly proud of my bat at any rate, even if it looks a little like Batman's logo.

[nenjin]

Spoiler: Stained glass is always nice (click to show/hide)

[nenjin]

Here's a little something for the nightowls.

This is arguably what I love doing the most. The details are where you can lose yourself in Sketchup; creating, playing, tweaking, importing models. I'm learning how to mass produce things now and it's greatly speeding up the super tedious shit like windows.

Most of my time here was actually spent cleaning up an oversight from months ago when I created it. One side of the building was 4' longer from the doorway than the other. Changing it revealed an awkwardly formed gap in the geometry that was preventing a wall from being movable. In the past, this would have been a tangled, fucked up mess that would have undone everything by trying to fix it. Now, because I'm being so much more careful, being surgical with this bitch is so much easier.

Measure twice, cut once, as the saying goes.

Spoiler: The Entry Hall V2.0 (click to show/hide)

[Soadreqm]

I think the columns do look a bit crowded. How about just having them on the edge of the round bit? You could add a little dome to the underside of said round bit to make it structurally sound

[nenjin]

Spoiler: Tweak tweak, all night long, tweak tweak while I sing this song (click to show/hide)

So I went with fewer columns, but instead of a dome I made a larger support beam that's fluted. I think I'll call that good for now, and add a nice lantern model when I find one to hang from bottom-center of the platform.

[MaximumZero]

Wow, you're really kicking ass on this thing, man. Keep up the good work!

[nenjin]

A thick mist covers the castle...

Spoiler: The Sunken Gardens, the last major exterior area (click to show/hide)

Imagine that greenish/brown stuff is reed and moss-strewn water. I abandoned the idea of trying to do terrain grids to simulate water here, because it was a pain in the ass to get it right in the graveyard. I'm not happy with the water texture or the flatness of it, so I may revisit those both when I come back for another pass. I can still try to do water the terrain-y way. We'll see.

Other than that I've been doing some minor, and some not so minor, detail work. Like putting down a few hundred fence objects.

Spoiler: [Insert Witty Vania-ism here (click to show/hide)

]]

Sketchup is......handling it, for now. But slow downs are becoming an issue in general. Lighting calculations take 2 minutes or more with every adjustment, and in certain areas frame rates are poop and there's a bit of response lag. Luckily I can still work, and it's never going to be animated or require live movement as far as Sketchup is concerned. How much more can it handle? That remains to be seen. Some stats:

63,333 edges
24,100 faces
235 Component Instances (Mostly fences >.>)
255 Materials

And here's an overview of the castle now. I'm happy to say it's pretty much totally eclipsed my old version at this point, and I'm still kind of staggered by how far along it's come (and how far it has to go.)

Spoiler: Booyah (click to show/hide)

At this point I should also extend an obligatory blanket thank you to all the modelers and Sketchup artists whose models I'm using and modifying, and who I'm not going to catalog for posterity purposes. Thanks for all your hard work!