Wob's unnamed 2015 castle project

Sounds awesome, can't wait to see it progress. I'd say definitely go for the Viking hall look with the great hall. Make sure to add lots of greebling to the castle wall!

AK is right, i am at 4 baseplates right now, my goal is 4x4 eventually to take the entire centre of my basement living room, but even my 4 baseplates, i use a ton of blue, green, greys on them to create a varied landscape.

if you are going to do this, start hitting PAB walls and grab as many 4x4 and bigger plates of green, tan, brown, blacks, blues... you are also gonna want a metric 50lbs of wedges/1x1plates to add detail to this massive massive piece. but if you get her done, she shall be sexy. :)Good luck man!

yeppers. i am about to put up another MOC for September in which i made a cliff face off a sea section. it will be up in a few with a story, and then allow me to continue moving my characters story forward.

Looking forward to it man!

This sounds like an epic project! I'm looking forward to following the progress, both of the design and the actual building I'm sure I will learn a lot for upcoming projects from following your project!

I made a 96x128 castle for our medieval landscape community build at our main LUG event last year (which I also have brought to another show and will bring to Lego Fan Weekend in Skaerbaek next week), separated in four 48x64 modules for transportability (pictures on flickr). I'll try to share some thoughts on my design process that might or might not give some useful ideas.



A short summary of my design process:
First, I had some constraints on the edges of the build which were mainly dictating the elevation and color of the edges of the build. (I assume that you have all degrees of freedom in that sense if it is not intended to be displayed together with the build of someone else?) This dictated the placement of the structure, but still left me with a huge freedom on how the castle was to be designed. I then went on to create a rough overview of where the towers, structures, river/moat and road were going to be located and where the boundaries between the modules were going to be (I tried to place ordinary walls over these so I did not have to cleave bigger structures).
The detailed design was started in a 'top-down' fashion, where I built and rebuilt the roofs and tower tops first (as I figured these were important to get right for the overall impression) and let these dictate the footprint of their respective structures. (In the end I rebuilt the entire top section of the largest tower - supposedly the old keep - because I had constructed that as a half-timbered structure which looked out of place in the all stone castle).
When I had the footprint of the castle finished, I made the supporting structure for the raised part of the ground (using almost all of my old castle panels from my childhood collection and literally all my technic beams, next time I will definitely use Duplo). I put the "stone skin" on the parts of the ground up to the foots of the walls and when all that was finished I started building the walls and towers (up to the already finished roofs/battlements).
Finally, I added the fine details on the ground and the figures.

Some thoughts on what I did well:
- Had an idea from the start of how it was supposed to be viewed (from the front) so the castle slopes upwards to the back allowing the spectators some more view inside it. Placed the large building towards the back (I had planned for a couple of more buildings, but in the end I did not have time for that).
- Made one part of the castle at an off-grid angle, just by having it there the viewers do not perceive it as "grid-locked" as if everyting was on the grid.
- Paid enough attention to smaller details on the walls and ground so that someone stopping for a while to look at it still did not think something looked rushed/unfinished.

Some thoughts on what I could have done better:
- Have a clear view of how the height of the walls look together, now I made the back wall as high over the ground as the front walls which looks weird when the ground at the back is so much higher.
- Mind the height of each module so they fit well into my boxes, now only the gatehouse module fit into a box. The front-right module is no problem when the upper part of the tower is taken off but the rear-left module has to have its battlements taken off along with the upper part of the tower to fit in. The roof of the great hall was too high so that module still has to go in an open box which I cannot stack...
- Not be overenthusiastic with the arrow slits, and let those be more randomly placed (especially the gatehouse suffers from that).
- Not place a huge tree in the courtyard making it difficult for the viewers to see what's going on inside (this will be removed for the next exhibition). This tree was also hard to transport as it stretched over the boundaries of all modules, I had to make it come off and place it on a removable frame on one of the road modules to be able to transport it.
- Not place too much details behind the wall facing the viewers.

Lack of motivation 1 - wobnam 0