Improving the Castle & Creating a Backdrop

The opening scene of my animation is going to be the camera rolling in from the path in front of the castle and going into the castle, showing the surrounding area and setting up the area for the next scene. For this, alot of detail has to go into the backdrop and area around the outside of the castle to try and make it look as realistic as possible.

The first thing I need to do is add more detail and definition to the castle itself. It needs to be bigger, look more realistic and have functioning windows and doors. To do this I need to cut out the black areas in the castle and add windowsills to the windows. Unfortunately, because of the way I made the castle, when you view the inside of the shape, it shows up as invisible. Because of this, I need to recreate the inside walls and I did this by adding boxes, aligning them up in the correct position and applying the appropriate material at the same scale as the outside walls using the UVW Map modifier. Having repeated this process for all the inside walls that are going to be visible, the next step was to add some small details to the inside area, such as tables, chairs and sources of light. Because these would be barely visible, if at all, only low poly models are required.

Once this was done, I wanted to add another section onto the castle to make it more like a genuine castle. I wanted this area to be open and for characters to be able to walk in and out of the building (even if that isn't what is going to happen, I want it for aesthetic reasons) so to make this I used a similar process to how I made the first part of the castle, except using separate boxes for each wall so cutting out the shape won't make the inside invisible. Again, as the inside isn't likely to be very visible from the outside, only a few details need to be added. I wanted this section to have a monastery type of feeling, so I added chairs and an altar at the opposite end of the room. The trickiest part of this building was getting the lighting correct and getting the roof the way I wanted.

Once the castle is complete, detail needed to be added to the rest of the backdrop. The first thing I did was create a plane for the ground which I would use the grass texture on, and made this quite alot bigger than the area which the castle occupies. As I wanted a pathway leading up to the castle, I went into photoshop to modify the textures I was using so that the rocky path blended in with the grass on either side. After doing this, it was a matter of pulling up vertex's and making the area bumpy and uneven. 

(mostly) seamless texture