Need inspiration? Get reference images of a german castle!

[tachzusamm]

Shorah.

Today I want to share something with you.
It was my intention to do this already a long time ago, but I did not find time to compile the collection. But now it's done.

Well, it began in july/august this year, when the German Myst Community members had their yearly community meeting. Maybe you've heard about it already.

It happened in Windischleuba, an old city in Thüringen, Germany. The meeting took 3 days, about 23 members plus some relatives participated, we had so much fun, wandered around the clime to find journey cloths and puzzle pieces, solved lots of puzzes in the afternoon, had a barbecue in the evening, and explored the castle (where we found additional pieces for the puzzle).
I took this chance to take some pictures of the astonishing castle, which is named "Schloss Windischleuba".

Wiki-link describing the city: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windischleuba (sorry, only available in german language)
Link to the youth hostel, where we stayed: http://www.djh-thueringen.de/38_jh_unserhaus.html

Now, here's the package of reference images.
I think it could be helpful for age builders, in case you ran out of ideas, or have troubles to find good references on the internet for modelling.
Some textures are also included.

Almost 100 images are included in this pack, which is about 160 megabytes in size.

Reference_Images_Windischleuba.jpg (579.6 KiB) Viewed 4704 times

Have fun exploring the package, and hopefully I will find some comments if you find this useful.

Download: Reference_Images_Windischleuba
(Information how the images can be used can be found in the attached text file.)

~Tach


EDIT: If you want to use portions of the images which are not located in the textures folder for texturing as well, maybe shots of a door texture, or close-ups, I'm okay with it too. Just don't re-publish those images elsewhere without asking first. Thank you.

[Calena]

Nice job Tach! And it's organized . I love organization. I need to do this with the several thousand textures I have saved on my hard drive.

Are you going back? If you do, can you get a straight down shot of that cobblestone with the grass? I've been looking everywhere for that exact texture and can never find it. I think I can pull it out of your photo. If not, I'm going to try using Google Earth on that castle. At least now I know where to find the texture . Thanks!

[tachzusamm]

Are you going back? If you do, can you get a straight down shot of that cobblestone with the grass?

I fear not. It was a many-hours-travel. Plus, I would have done it already this way, but I fear I can't manage to fly above the ground to get it photographed right from the top. Unless you want my legs to be included in the texture as well.


EDIT:
But here's a way how I usually straighten slightly or huge distorted textures using Blender:
1. Put the image on a single plane in a new blendfile, UV-unwrapped, and a few times subdiveded
2. Adjust the UV-mapping in a way that the distortion disappears
3. Place an orthogonal camera right above the plane
4. Set the material to shadeless
5. Render, and save it as a new, undistorted texture.

Here's a video tutorial about this technique I created some while ago; unfortunately I made it in german language,
but maybe you can understand what I'm doing there nevertheless.
And I'm always talking slowly, so you'll have to be patient, lol.

http://www.texturu.org/share/videos/Tut ... g_1024.wmv

[dendwaler]

Do you want to rebuild exactly Windischleuba?
I did not mention it before but several month ago i started another project , i learned from the cathedral which also is in the pipeline, how to make some repetitive architectual builds.
Some of your images might be of use for me.

The project itself is in an early stage and builded in blender 2.6.
I have not build much of it yet, (mainly because PyPRP2 misses essential tools i need.)
but what i have is quite impressive.

If you are curious.
Its a rebuild of Castle Estel !
Google for it.