The following piece is a re-creation of a spanish castle just south of madrid, known as the Real de Manzanares. Originally built by spanish nobility for defense against the Moors, It was captured and 'retrofitted' into a sort of rustic palace by those very people. Intended for inclusion into an Unreal Tournament map, it is now being tweaked for import into the new UT 2k3 engine.

Original Source Photographs:

Here are some of the photos of the Real des Manzanares which i used to get an idea of the castles color schema. Click on the thumbnails to see the full sized image.

Primary 'Lego' Modules:

The first step of modeling for a game engine such as Unreal Tournamanet is to break the structure down, visually, into its simplest repeatable units. These units, or 'legos', should be modeled as simply as possible, using only the minimum number of polygons to communicate the shape of the object*. The legos, once modeled and textured, can be imported into the level editor relatively easily., One can then duplicate the legos and shape them into the structure desired.

Here are both still shots and animations of the more common legos used to re-create the Real de Manzanares. The Animations will require Quicktime 6 to play. I recommend hitting 'save target as' to download them, rather than playing them from the browser.

*this rule has been relaxed somewhat with Epics new "static mesh" technology, which uses the GPU, or video card processor, to render high-polycount objects. Even so, since this technology isnt perfect for all situations, simplicity should still be a primary concern.

Still Renders of Re-creation:

Using the source images above, as well as shots of other Moorish castles, I was able to recreate the major aspects of the Real with fewer than 20,000 polygons.

Animations of Re-creation:

Here are some animations of the interior and exterior of the Real de Manzanares. They will require Quicktime 6 to play. I recommend hitting 'save target as' to download them. **NOTE** Windows XP users seem to have trouble opening the movie files, due to directX conflicts. If you are experiencing directX issues, please try playing the animations under Windows 2000, NT or Macintosh OSX

In-game Screencaptures:

Here are some images captured from DM-Manzanres, the Unreal Tournament 2k3 level which incorporates my re-creation of the castle. The level itself will be released as a Umod file in February 2003.