~Skye Acres~ said:

I have no wordd. That is so amazing *.*

What program did you use for the 3D modeling? And when you were done with the modeling, did you just layer it into PS/Krita, or did you use a different program entirely?

Toasty and I used Blender for the modeling. https://www.blender.org/ For those interested in 3D, it's an amazing, free (and open-source!) software, but the learning curve is understandably a bit steep. I did the materials using various tutorials on Youtube and 1 texture from a stock image. I rendered it on my poor Mac (with a transparent bg), then immediately pasted it into Krita. I had to scale up the pasted image, since I don't know to change the resulting image dimensions, and it would take 4x as long to render probably.

Here are some standalone images/WIPs of the 3D castle!

Model without materials (and before Toasty added those sweet arches):

With materials (ground texture from https://www.deviantart.com/wollibear/art/Texture-4-465307429)
:

With materials + lighting:

In the Krita file, I put the materials+lighting render on top of materials-only render, duplicated the materials+lighting layer a whole bunch (using easy dodge and multiply blend modes, with transparency masks). I also used a slightly different camera angle of the model with a vivid light blending mode to create... a kinda fractal look I guess? And then I used real castle stock blended into the model to make it look less fake (hopefully, but it's ongoing)

I've got screenshots of some of me building up the bg (but unfortunately forgot to take screenshots layer-by-layer of the castle...), which I will turn into a gif soon.

Also, regarding customs, this time I really swear I will open up a slot in time for August's RO (or maybe even sooner). It will be a big image, hopefully on the scale of this castle piece in terms of complexity/detail, but probably won't include a palette.

And thank you everyone for the compliments on the WIP <3 It means so much, since I've been somewhat doubtful of this experimental direction I'm going in!!

Full-size: https://i1.lensdump.com/i/jnCJ1c.png

BG is done for my new piece! Normally I wouldn't fully flesh out BGs, except that I plan on putting the horse in its own image so that it can move around or something. (btw I've snuck in two animals into the piece, but they're not easy to find)

Full process gif:

I broke up the above gif into smaller pieces to make it easier to view.

Part 1 (mountains & waterscape): https://i1.lensdump.com/i/jnCT2k.gif

Part 2 (Castle & rocks): https://i1.lensdump.com/i/jnCECx.gif

Part 3 (atmosphere & finishing touches): https://i1.lensdump.com/i/jnCkSH.gif

Stock used: