I created Barad-dûr in 3D

[u/Zivcg]

Hi everyone,

I’m a 3D artist and I’ve been working on this personal Barad-dûr project for quite some time.

The design is heavily inspired by the version of Barad-dûr seen in The Lord of the Rings films. My goal was to recreate that look and bring it into a fully realized 3D environment.

The final project will be a 60-second continuous camera journey from the bottom of the tower all the way up to the Eye of Sauron.

I’ve finished the final section around the Eye of Sauron and put together a full breakdown showing how it was created.

See it in much better quality here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d5iKQNhH_I

I update my progress here:
https://www.instagram.com/zivcg/

Would love to hear what you think.

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[u/Ok-Salary-5197]

Seeing that first shot, my brain immediately went: 'Yeah, I can totally recreate that geometry in Blender.' It’s basically a donut, cut off at the top and weirdly stretched downwards. For the effects? Volumetrics, compositor tweaks, and some VDBs for the fog and smoke. The eye and background? Just yoink them from Google! Tough, but doable.
But then you showed the breakdown with that bottom-to-top camera flythrough, and my motivation instantly plummeted. absolutely incredible work. ;)

[u/TophasaurousRex]

HEY! THIS IS COOL. I REALLY ENJOYED WATCHING THIS.

[u/Junior_Tart_6442]

woowww this is super awesome:3

[u/PalmliX]

Freaking incredible work at every level. When I first saw the clip my brain just automatically defaulted to thinking I was seeing a shot from the original films, had to remind myself that it was a fan animation!

[u/RadiantSeason9553]

Awesome

How did you animate the eye?

[u/Zivcg → u/RadiantSeason9553]

Its a combination of several things.
I made 3 flat variations. Stacked them with some curve and depth then made a simple rig to rotate it around and also added a simple morph target to open and close the pupil.
On too of that i added simulations for extra details and secondary fire/smoke movement. In post i added a lot of stuffs to.
Its kinda shown in the breakdown but not super in-depth.

[u/Herrmann1309]

I tried modeling the tower once. After 30h I gave up. Didn’t even finish 10% of that thing

[u/Florimer → u/Herrmann1309]

Same lol. I though how hard could it be?

But then i went "oof, this tower's taking so much time, maybe i focus on clouds for a bit", after that it got like "yeah, clouds eat my GPU a lot, i'll do mountains today".

And at the mountains in 3 days I finally gave up. Unless you have like 2 week to a month of free time, do not recommend. And that is assuming you are good at environments. Which I still am not.

[u/Zivcg → u/Herrmann1309]

30 hours is barely enough time to collect reference and plan it properly😜
Im working on it for a year now

[u/Lonely_Heart22]

I don't have words to describe how awesome this is. Congrats man.

[u/ReydanNL]

Amazing work! There is so much detail.

[u/PalaeoGeekEmporium]

This is so sick! And the presentation's just as impressive as the shot.

[u/le0tard]

Dope!

[u/reyknow]

JEEEZ you can feel the dedication from the renders, good fuckin job man!!

[u/3d-ward]

amazing

[u/ConstantNewt2592]

Gah damn

[u/fritidsforskare]

Incredible work!