August/September 2017 Challenge: Dwarf City

[Mouse]

Totally incredible!

Don't worry too much about colours right now, since I assume you are able to adjust each texture and affect wherever it appears on the map in a matter of seconds. If you looked at all my WIPs lined up together you would probably see huge variations between each one. Colour is enormously important, of course, if you choose to use it, but it needs to take its own time - usually telling you what's wrong the moment you first open the file each day. I get far better results if I only fiddle around with it for a few minutes each time I come back to the map, and don't allow myself to go on for too long and get disheartened by it in any one day

[Falconius]

Thanks Ilanthar
Thanks Mouse

Yeah I'm not stuck on the colour, and I think if I weer actually smart I'd set everything to a specific palette, but it doesn't hurt to have placeholders for now. I'm really bad with colours and things like that so I at least try and think about them as I move forward. Generally I'm much more comfortable of thinking of materials, so like wood is brown/yellowish/greyish, or stone is greyish/whitish, or copper roof is powdery green and while that works fine for placeholders since I can tell what everything is at a glance and just put things where they belong logically, it makes for terrible composition.

Not a lot of progress, just chipping away at it. I've got a veiw port render of some of the things I made for the map:

Just to give a sense of scale that barque is about 70 meters long (not including the bowsprit) and there is also a little canal boat in the bottom left and that is 15 meters long.

The house outlined in yellow I just made, and I really like, but I went for a smidgen too much detail I think, but when you think of the trees or that barque I made over there, it about matches their level. I find it really difficult to keep a consistent level of detail between everything, but with buildings I always want more and it's tough to not put it in. Of course putting arches in things immediately ups the detail automatically because it creates a lot of faces and there is no point in them going to waste so... maybe that was the problem here.

On the positive side I think I am sneaking up on an acceptable style for my dwarves. Originally I was conceiving it as "geometric baroque", but now it's going off on its own. I'm trying to claw back a century or two to an age on the cusp of the renaissance, but not actually in it. And as ever I'm mulling over the question of have they developed guns and cannons or not, which has an influence on fortification design, right now I'm saying not, but they've got highly advanced crossbows and the like. Never really sure where to land on that one (guns), and I have a hard time accepting worlds like Warhammer where some do and some don't just because, either the technology has been discovered or not, and the people that don't have it yet get steamrolled. At the same time a bunch of the stuff I find most interesting is Renaissance era stuff or later... Ah difficulties.

[Mouse]

The first gun was invented in 1365, which predates pretty much everything else.

What a destructive bunch we are!

But this is fantasy, where everything goes

Those are remarkably beautiful models, Falconius

[Falconius]

Yeah but it took a while before it became more useful than the weapons we already had. First in siege weaponry and then in hand held weaponry. It actually took a couple hundred years, and indeed the Chinese had gunpowder long before even that. As for fantasy everything goes, no not really, that was what I was pointing out about Warhammer, they've basically taken weapons from the entirety of history and mashed them all together, and while it may be fun for battles (most of which is down to game mechanics whereby they can make all weapons essentially equal), it makes for crappy everything else, or if not crappy very one dimensional. Indeed the fantasy stories I tend to like the most largely have logically cohesive worlds, that make sense in their terms. But it's really not that important. No guns as of yet for my dwarves.

Thanks about the models, I just wish there were more of them

[Falconius]

Progress shots. I've been experimenting with trees.

While playing around with the fields I've put smooth shading on them and it looks awful. So I'll put back to flat shading. Not sure if, or how, I can get them to work.

### Latest WIP ###

Playing around with the colours. I'm pretty happy with the elevation band colouring. Getting them to progress better will take a bit of tweaking, Blender doesn't seem to have an easy way to colour pick, so I've been hand editing them all. After this I've also switched the HDRI from Table Mountain lighting as seen here, to a more northern one. As ever HDRI's are from HDRI Haven.

I've also made a bunch of buildings most of which aren't placed yet so here's a view port render:

[Mouse]

You could try taking all and any reflectivity out of the grass. That might work. It looks very much like its reflecting light according to the normal of each particular face.

The trees are brilliant

EDIT: Those building look great. I think you might have to add a bit more detail to them to make them look real against those very real trees, though.

[Falconius]

The buildings are detailed as much as I think they need to be, the trees on that band are scaled oversized I think, so you can actually see their detail as compared to the buildings.

[Falconius]

Working on the canals. I'm really wondering how to approach the underground city part of this city? But the Canals and streets/mineways are obviously the start. But how do you do the dwellings and underground "buildings"?

[Mouse]

I'm a bit confused by the question. Do you mean the underground dwellings?

If you do, then I presume they would look best as clusters of buildings in carved out caverns - like an underground city. But as to how to depict that kind of thing I really don't know. Maybe like a traditional underground battle map with irregular rough cut walls and lighting only from the artificial (and more yellowish than daylight) light sources within the caverns?

[Falconius]

Yeah, those canals are all inside the mountain, and doing "streets" would be the same way, you make a floor and some walls right? But how would you do an underground house? You basically have to represent it from the "outside", I guess, but really how does one do that? What I'm thinking is to do sort of the shapes of the rooms as just solid objects, so in effect it would be a lot like a house as one would represented on the surface, but obviously designed for underground (no roofs, but showing the space it occupies vertically and horizontally). Boy I don't even know how to talk about it even it's such an alien way of thinking.