In this thread I’ll be chronicling the construction of my recreation in ROBLOX of Arendelle Castle, as seen in the movie Frozen. This thread will have a lot of pictures, from such diverse sources as my build, screencaps from the movie, concept art from the movie’s production, and the real-life inspirations for the castle. Because I’ve been working on the castle for a while now, this first post will be rather long, but future updates will be shorter. So sit back, pour a glass of hot gløgg, put on some appropriate music, and get ready to scroll through lots of pictures.
I began construction on April 28[sup]th[/sup], 2014. Normally I don’t record my progress when building things, but this project was an exception. I was building it for AnnaChomniak’s Arendelle group, and she wanted to see my progress, so I’d take a screenshot and send it to her.
First, here’s a screencap showing the entire castle at the end of the movie:
The first thing I built was the bridge, seen in the lower left of the above image. This connects the castle to the town, so it was a good place to start. The bridge has three arches, so I began by building one of them.
Once this was done, I basically copied it three times to form the entire bridge.
Here’s a movie screencap to compare it with:
After this, I went on to the main gate and gatehouse. The gatehouse sits at one end of the bridge, so it was a logical continuation. The white-and-brown stripes on the gate weren’t quite accurate to the movie, but they were close enough for now.
This is where I ran into my first real problem. I was using a free-model door opening script that AnnaChomniak had given me (which claims to use a rotate function by Anaminus), and it turns out that it didn’t move all that smoothly when each side of the gate had 80 pieces.
I tried and tried to fix it, but ultimately to no avail. Later I would experiment with replacing the white stripes with a decal, which seemed promising, but then CSG came out and I was able to bring each side down to nine parts. Until then, though, I put the problem on the backburner and moved on.
With the lower half of the gatehouse done, I started on the walls. The walls are essentially the same design all around the castle, a wooden rampart behind stone bricks walls with a slate roof overhead. Once I had the height of the wall’s roof established, I started on the upper half of the gatehouse.
With the gatehouse done, I moved on to the towers on either side of the gatehouse. Because they and their wall segments are identical, I built one side and then mirrored it. The curved windows on the tower were a real pain to do, and I ended up trying a few different methods (and in the end I think they were too big, but oh well). If I had had CSG at this point it may have been easier, but I was blissfully unaware it was even in development.
Once the tower was done, I continued down along the walls. Not only are the wall segments identical (except in length), most of the towers are too, which made this portion of the build mostly mirroring walls and towers and making them fit together.
Continuing along the south and west walls to the fat tower:
The wall segment with the weird triangle-roofed thing would eventually be revised into something resembling the correct proportions, but for now it was a bit too long.
At this point (around mid-May), I decided to take a break from walls and move on to the chapel, which will be the feature of the next post.
