Scenery Props – Some Houses
I decided that I will need to pepper my scenes with at least a village or two and the odd lone house for Smuggler Bill and Exciseman Gill to ride past. There are plenty of suitable buildings in the Google / Trimble 3D warehouse, but I decided to get started by buying an iClone content pack called “Medieval Slum Construction Set”. This comes with a couple of complete buildings of different shapes plus various extension pieces and props to enable each house to be customised to help avoid too much repetition. I wanted to take this further and instead of just having stone built houses with green slime on the stone, I wanted some bricks and also a few thatched houses.
First I opened the diffuse map on one of the houses provided in the pack in PaintShop Pro. I replaced the stone texture part of the diffuse map with a brick texture and did some repair work on the rendering on the walls. Then I applied the diffuse map to the house and saved it as a custom prop. I then replaced the roof tile texture with a thatch one. I then applied that and saved another custom prop.
Although it was not very noticeable that the bump map behind the bricks was not quite right, the thatch on the roof showed up as having a distinct tiled effect about it. I used B2M (subject of an earlier post) to create a thatch bump map from the thatch texture I had pasted onto the diffuse map. Otherwise I left the bump map unchanged.
The original house is the one in the middle and the others are the modified versions. The thatch looks a little thin and I could do some more work to bulk it up. Also the chimney pots now have thatched tops, which might not be a good idea given there may be a roaring fire below. However Bill and Gill will be galloping past, so I don’t expect there to be many shots lingering on the detail of the houses themselves, so I guess will not try to perfect them much further.
Tony