"A castel in the snow" Breakdown

I just started some handy sketch to form the first concept! After that I jumped to Maya to block out the train and castle towers and main walls!

For this project I had many options and many pre-provided objects to use! Which you can find tones of them on the internet! But this is not what I call “Art”! Always prefer to fill up my scene with Farid’s 3D objects rather than have collection of others.

For the environment I modeled a boat, all my unique trees, low level walls covered by snow, Catapult and so on! Then duplicated some of them where I needed! You can always benefit from symmetry, duplication, scale and rotation to have various objects.

One of the most exciting parts in this project was trees for me! Except a few, I created all trees in the scene with the help of Maya Paint effect! It’s really powerful and I think you can create a whole jungle through that!

I used 2 methods for the snow! V-ray 2D displacement for the ground snow! Maya nParticle for the castle and trees snow! Definitely the ground did not take much time! You can create your snow by a proper map easily!

To be honest I did not spend too much time on the textures in this project! But chose the best fastest way! I mean procedural material! Here you can see the final setup for the wall material. Base stone texture covered by white cement with fractal node!

I usually start by simple gray mat and key light! Then you need to highlight each hero of the project by adding some small light, right to the point! Don’t be afraid of adding many lights to your scene! Try various type of lights!

Lights can tell your audiences which part should be watch more or first! Determines the mood and vibes of your artwork! Lighting can tell the story behind your work!