Polycount's Noob Challenge 7

I've been part of the Polycount forum for a little while now and it really is a great forum to be a part of. Full of very very talented people all with good critics and advice and are always happy to help which is very handy for anyone still learning and improving.

For a while I've seen "Noob Challenges" appear on the forum once a month as people recreate a piece of concept artwork in a fully fledged 3d environment representing it. Unfortunately I've never quite been able to take the time to do one as I've been quite busy with uni, however now that I'm off for summer I thought I'd try my hand at it.

Above is this month's concept piece, not quite sure where it's from but it is quite lovely. During this challenge many of the participants set certain goals aside for themselves to achieve such as learning something new or improving in a certain area.

I'll be happy to get it done, especially since I started into it 9 days late, silly me. However this piece will still be very good practice for creating realistic foliage as well as texturing, for which I think I will use hand painted textures.

Below is what I've managed to achieve after day 1, which I am quite happy with. Next step I think will be the walls and possibly mudboxing the terrain.

And here is how it looks within UDK.

I will have to remember to create some custom lightmaps for this mesh as well as you can seen the tris on the central gate house.