Hadleigh Castle.

I felt that Hadleigh Castle would be a good location to model for our animation.
The ruins of the castle sitting atop a hill would be a great scene once rendered, and you would be able to catch the sun and sky in the scene aswell as the castle itself.
For this scene, I decided to model one of the remaining towers of the castle, as this is the most recognisable part of the remaining ruins.

To create my model, I started with a cylinder, which I made into the rough dimentions of the castle tower.
From here, I chose to discard of the middle sections of the top and bottom caps, as well as part of the side.
As you can see from looking at photos of hadleigh, a large portion of the side is missing.
Once these polygons had been deleted, I had to stitch together the open gaps of the model using the creat polygon tool. This would ensure that my model is completely solid with no holes or gaps in thew actual mesh.

Once this had been completed, i could start modelling the features of the tower.
I started by creating the windows in the tower.
The windows of the tower are small vertical slits, that are bevelled into the castle walls from the inside.

I also created the lumps and bumps on the sinde of the tower, which would have once been the floor to the different levels of the tower. all that remains of these floors are parts along the tower walls. I extruded the polygons where these features are.

Now I moved onto the outside of the tower, where I replicated the uneven top the tower.
The tower roof, and some of the top parts of the tower wall are missing, giving it an uneven surface around the entire tower.
Iused a combination of soft selection modifying and regular modifying to achieve the desired effect.

Once this was complete, I could move onto the rest of the outside of the tower.
The tower isnt perfect verticle, and actuals bevels out towards the base, so I replicated this in my model.

Now the model itself was complete, and it was time to add a material to the tower.

I used a brick material I found in the Program files of 3DSMAX for the texture of my model.
I imported this image into photoshop, where I played with the colour of the bricks, and then saved the image, to use again in 3DSMAX.
In order for the material to wrap around the tower correct, I used a cyclindrical UVW Map.
I then added a bump map of the same image to give the material more realism.