Design Focus : Castle Araluen<em>This week I’ll walk you through our inspirations and the design details of Castle Araluen as well as how I built it.</em>
Graham and I love house build and renovation programmes on TV. Our absolute favourite is Châteaux DIY, a series that follows people who have bought French Châteaux in various states of dereliction as they restore them to their former glory.
Who knows maybe one day we’ll do something like this ourselves, but for now building our dream virtual castle inspired by all our favourite elements of the Châteaux we’ve been watching gradually coming back to life is as close as we’ll get to owning a castle.
Castle Inspirations
In addition to this series I’ve had a lot of fun exploring and researching Châteaux architecture. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to go to a couple of these amazing buildings and see them in the stone. My favourite style is Renaissance - your archetype fairy tale castle - so this is where I have drawn a lot of my inspiration from. Some of my favourites are Château Chenonceau, d’Ussé, Fontainebleau, Pierrefonds, Chamboard and Belle Epoque.
Oh and while I do hold a mechanical engineering degree, stress and structures were never my forte so please don’t judge my roof support design too harshly!
I had the privilege of going to school in a grade 1 listed building and gardens. I earned my place there by way of a music scholarship and it is undeniably where my love of grand old buildings and beautiful gardens originates. Several aspects of the place I called home for seven years have influenced the design of Castle Araluen. For example there is a huge orangery at one end of the building that today houses the stage (where we did many of our concerts) but that was once home to exotic fruit trees. Although I never saw it in that configuration I often imagined what it would have been like to walk through the vast hot house full of citrus trees. While deep in grounds there are several Victorian glass houses where we did all our orchestra and choir rehearsals that were originally designed to house camelias and other exotic plants. They were unconventional spaces to practice and hone our music skills but they were beautiful and inspiring as were the views out over the terraced lawns, formal gardens and giant specimen trees. My friends and I shared a tower room for a couple of years and we used to love standing at the balcony windows watching the storms roll in during the summer months illuminating the great trees with lightening. Those were moments where it felt like we lived in a fairy tale…they were rare and far between all the assignments and exams, but they were there!
Castle Araluen
So our imaginary castle had to have towers, glass houses and formal gardens. I’ve evolved the huge trees into an enchanted forest, because in my view no good fairy tale is complete without an enchanted forest! I’ve had fun with the huge balconies in order to create a sort of extremely luxurious tree house feel - the perfect place for morning cup of tea or a cold glass of wine in the evening.
I also decided to put glass houses at both ends as living in the UK I often wish our garden had a glass roof and walls to keep out the rain and bitter winds so we could enjoy it for more of the year… I have lots of plans for the glass houses of Castle Araluen, but that’s a story for another day. If you’re wondering, yes I have just basically modelled my dream house if money was absolutely no object and the laws of physics don’t apply, but the laws of magic do.
The grounds
Living in a city we often get a point where we need to escape to somewhere where there are wide open spaces, fresh air and big trees. As such we have spent many a day exploring the grounds of stately homes around the country with our furry monsters.
One of our favourite places to visit is Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, it’s a wonderful place to walk around and easy to find a lovely spot for a picnic. As such there are details from Chatsworth estate that have influenced the park land and layout, specifically the main bridge that leads to Castle Araluen and the immediate landscape. Although I’ve chosen to give Castle Araluen a loch side location as apposed to a river side one.
The more formal landscaping is a mixture of the grounds of my school, Chatsworth and many other gardens I’ve had the pleasure of strolling through over the years. These are still a work in progress at the moment. I’ll write more about them as they evolve.
Construction
Almost all of Castle Araluen is constructed using geometry nodes. I chose this method because I didn’t have the entire design figured out before I started modelling and I wanted the ability to be able to tweak the various elements of the castle relative to each other as I built it. Being non destructive Nodes were the obvious choice for this. I’ve built the castle in sections e.g The Glass Houses, Towers, Walls etc. Each one of these sections contains individual elements that each have their own node tree, some of the more complicated node trees have node groups within them that contain another level of node geometry I want to be able to use elsewhere in the model. I’m not sure this is the best way to do it, but I was conscious of the fact that I didn’t want my node tree to become so huge it was a pain to navigate so I decided to do it this way. The node tree for the front towers is the first one I put together from scratch after completing some beginner blender courses (see the VoA world build page for details of those) and the castle evolved from there as I gained more confidence and knowledge from it.
If you want to get into modelling worlds and complex buildings I’d really recommend getting hold of a space mouse this is the one I have because it makes navigating around both the world space and the node trees so much easier. They aren’t the cheapest of things and it takes a while to get the hand-eye coordination going with them but it’s definitely worth the investment (both financial and time) for the reduced risk of getting / aggravating RSI (trust me I speak from experience!)
The elements that aren’t created using geometry nodes are the rooves and the gold phoenixes that adorn the apex of each turret, the space above the front door and on the gates. The former I subdivided and sculpted a basic cone shape into a more ‘witches hat’ profile and then positioned them with geometry nodes relative to the tower walls. While the latter I used this tutorial to help me turn the phoenix I created in Adobe Illustrator for our logo into a 3D model and then as with the rooves I positioned them with geometry nodes.
If you have any questions about how I’ve built elements of the castle please feel free to ask them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Next Time
The next two weeks are going to be full of Blender texture tutorials and experiments to try and pin down the art style we want for The Vale of Araluen. I’m hoping to figure out how to create a vibrant watercolour effect. So it looks soft and magical.
Thank you for reading,
