Castle Howard

[MartinPh]

Well, it took over a year and I don't even want to think about the number of hours I spent on it, but it's done.

Castle Howard (situated some 12 miles north of the city of York, UK) was designed in 1699 by John Vanbrugh (who was at that time not an architect but a playwright!) for the 3d Earl of Carlisle. Building progressed steadily for a while, until the earl shifted his attention to laying out the gardens and then ran into money trouble. The proposed west wing and forecourt were never finished according to Vanbrugh's design. When a successor finally came round to finishing the building some 80 years later, Vanbrugh's baroque had gone out of fashion and a family member who fancied himself an architect came up with a bland design in the then fashionable palladian style, that took no account whatsoever of the original plans, giving the building the strange, lopsided look we know today. The current owners of the house are so dismayed by this that they won't even allow pictures of this wing to appear in the guidebook.

It's been a while since I first thought that SU would be an ideal means of creating a 3d vision of Vanbrughs original plan. So last year I took the plunge. I worked from drawings in Vitruvius Britannicus (published in three volumes from 1715-1725 and recently reissued by Dover), from photographic reference material (some of it collected during a visit to the house last May), and when neither was conclusive or where drawings were at odds with each other I used my imagination, hopefully in the spirit of Vanbrugh.

So here it is. Renders were done in iRender NXT and are as yet basic. Texturing is a problem, bitmaps simply won't do in a model this size, you get patterning, it looks ugly. But at least iRender is able to handle this 81MB beast, which is more than can be said of Vray... exporting 2D images from SU itself is rather more of a problem too...

[Rich O Brien]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for sharing this mammoth project and congrats on the superb outcome. This is incredible

Would love to see this given the Vue treatment with lots of vegatation, but as is it's still inspiring

[Gaieus]

Wow.

This is superb!

Well, it took over a year and I don't even want to think about the number of hours I spent on it...

Why not? It seems to have been well worth every moment of modelling!

Would love to see this given the Vue treatment with lots of vegatation

True - that's probably all it needs at this stage. Although with iRender, you can get all those fractal plants, too, can't you?

[MartinPh]

I did these renders in the trial version of iRender, which runs out in 6 days, so I'm now considering buying it. It does have good RPC plant options that I'd love to experiment with!

...and with regard to all those hours, you are right, I enjoyed most of them hugely!

[alpro]

Incredible modeling! Would love to see some closeups of some of the detailed areas.



Mike

[remus]

Amazing project! Did you model the statues as well or are they textures/components?

[charly2008]

Hi MartinPh,

It looks fantastic and certainly needed a lot of detail work. I like this historic projects very much. Historic buildings are my favorites too but most of the time the problem is to find good plans or drawings.

[fymoro]

Mama mia !!!

[EscapeArtist]

Great job!

[olishea]

amazing work!! congratulations!

[MartinPh]

Remus, the statues are 3d, but I must adnmit I didn't model them myself. I found them on the internet and only simplified them a bit for use in this model. The bas reliefs on the facade are textures.

Yeah, Charly, I prefer historical buildings too for modeling. But it is indeed rare to find such good reference material as in Vitruvius Brittanicus. It was the Dover reissue of that book which got me going on this project. Actually, VB will allow you to model almost any 18th century English country house; but I think I'll lay off for a while and do something completely different...

[MartinPh]

Oh, and did I say thank you yet to Fredo for his brilliant plugins, without which this would have taken another year at least?

[numbthumb]

Size does matter after all...Congratulations!

[Daniel]

That is F@!/*#- awsome!

[artysmedia]

I ever envy those guys that make so great effort to make so beautiful buildings!

[Mike1158]

Fantastic. I think you have a winner.

[Stinkie]

That's some model!

[urgen]

...good work))) thanks!

[KXI System]

That is F@!/*#- awsome!

Double over here man



10 wow, your the second person I gave this too!

[jopsa2]

very very impressive!! what a huge project to undertake, but definitely worth it! I would definitely recommend texturing it, would turn it into a killer project!

Can i ask about the stats? hoy many edges etc, did Sketchup handle it ok?

PS. nice touch with the sketchup fog

[pmolson]

Add me to the list of awed viewers.
Amazing!

[dale]

You have my absolute respect. Wow!!

[MartinPh]

Thanks all! Jopsa, I'd love to texture it, but I would need a renderer that does procedurals (actually I have one, Vray, but it is unable to render models this large ). I think I'll be experimenting in Photoshop instead. Best of all would be to export this to Vue, as someone else suggested, but on my system that is definitely out of the question... (and like SU, Vue is very good at handling its own native format, but not so good at handling imported geometry).

As for stats:
3,446,304 edges
1,527,138 faces
6,682 component instances
3,832 groups

I am on a P4, 2,13 Ghz dual core Vista PC, with 4 GB of RAM and a 'Loser Edition' nVidia card that I will be replacing one of these days... (it messes up shadows completely). The model was finished in SU 7, and SU can handle it without any problem at all; only, when orbiting, components and groups go into box mode. I had several crashes, however, when trying to export large bitmaps.

PS, Jopsa: I found your Pantheon greatly inspiring, it seems to me that operates at an even higher level of detail!

[MartinPh]

Here's another render. I love this feature of iRender, it actually does true orthogonal renders.

[Paul Russam]

Well done! I'm truly impressed. That's a lot of work you've done there.
Do you have an example of the drawings you worked from?, I'd love to see what type of info you had.

[3eighty]

Fantastic work...Reminds me of a castle out of "The Tudors"...If you want a render done in Vue I'd be happy to do one for you...

[Al Hart]

Nice stuff.

I put a link to this thread on the Render Plus Blog.

If you need another 30 days of IRender nXt, you can renew the trial code at: Reset Trial

And I'll send you a PM with a special discount for IRender nXt.

Keep up the good work!

[linea]

Martin
This is phenomenal work. I live about an hour from Castle Howard so have visited a few times. Wish I'd thought about doing an SU model!

jon

[studio1]

I am truely amazed - I'd like to say this is a stunning piece of work but it simply wouldn't do justice to the care and the sheer dedication gone into this.

Unbeleivable....

[d12dozr]

Phenomenal modeling! Thanks for posting here for us all to enjoy