Historical insight :
Allthough they were built with the typical stones of the region often dark granite, and thus look very ancient, most 'Malouinières' are in fact quite recent castles, built in the XVII-XVIIIth centuries.
These castles, very typical from the surroundings of the Saint-Malo corsair city, were most of the time built by shipowners of the city, who became rich through cod fishing activities and later, thanks to corsair activities against Dutch, English and later Portuguese commercial ships. Some of these shipowners became so famous that the king Louis XIVth ennobled them.
The date of their construction explains the tall buildings, the large windows and the slate roofs. These were residential castles, and not military buildings.

The model:
It is not an exact reproduction of an existing castle, but a mix between three of them. The model is composed of five buildings set together. Each building comes with a 4096*4096 set of : texture map, displacement map, normal map, and, when needed, specular map.
The castle was modeled in Lightwave and textured in 3D-Coat.
To take full advantage of the normal map, recommended Lightwave version is 9.0 or higher, but the model should be usable in previous versions with textures and displacement maps.