@wisaac407 (wisaac407) posted a new topic, subject "Medieval City". It read:

   Hay guys! This is a scene of a medieval city that I rendered just yesterday.
    
    composited - final.jpg1920×1080 335 KB
    
      
    
    
    In the near future I plan on posting the steps I took for making it. All thoughts, suggestions and comments are welcome!

So @Modron (Modron) replied

    pretty cool scene, but there are a lot of things you could add to make it more lively, such as pathways or roads, maybe with a cart or carriage moving along. also, with the number and density of houses, I think there might be a stronghold, or tower of some kind. also some gardens and at least one well for drinking water, and some fences and live stock.

@wisaac407 (wisaac407) replied

    That's a very good point. I'll add some roads throughout. I think that I am going to add a wall on the near side of the city, but I am not sure if it should be a brick or palisade wall?
    
    Also does anybody know where I can get some good characters for this scene, I just came from Blendswap and found a lack of medieval characters.

Then @Camel_Studios (Camel Studios) said

    Looks like a pretty cool, well composed scene. One problem I see though when you look at the picture close up is that a lot of the buildings have part of their base floating in mid air because they are built on a slope. You should either put some stilts under them or level the terrain under each building.
    
    It'd probably also look better if you played with the scale of the buildings a bit because they're all a fairly uniform size, and put some roads in.

To which @wisaac407 (wisaac407) replied

    Yeah, I am not sure what the best way of fixing that is. I could flatten the terrain under each building but that would be quite tedious. I suppose stilts could work because it is so close to the water, but I think it would look a little weird. The other option would be to add a walk out basement on each building. Any suggestions?

To which @Camel_Studios (Camel Studios) replied

    The only problem with the walk out basement idea is that the terrain is different under each house, so the walk out basement you make for one instance of a house model might have the door half covered by the terrain on another instance of that house. At least with the stilts it doesn't matter if a large portion of them are obscured by the terrain since it will just look like that house has shorter stilts.
    
    If you've used linked duplicates it should take no time at all to add some stilts and see how it looks.

So @wisaac407 (wisaac407) replied

    Here is what it looks like with some quick stilts:  
    
    
    composited - final - stilts.jpg1920×1080 337 KB
    
      
      
    I'm not entirely sold on the idea but if I remodel the buildings a little it might work.

@wisaac407 (wisaac407) replied

    I decided the flatten the ground under each building instead of using stilts:  
    
    
    composited - final.jpg1920×1080 335 KB
    
      
    
    
    I also added some roads(although they are a little hard to see) and some rocks poking through the steeper parts of the landscape. Now it is time to start working on the wall, I am thinking it should be palisade but I am not sure.
    
    ### Attachments
    
    composited - final.jpg1280×720 73.3 KB

After which, @rjshae (rjshae) added

    Right now it just looks like a housing development, at least to me. To make it authentic, I think it needs representatives of the first two estates, so I'd suggest putting a stronghold at the peak of the hill and adding a prominent temple. There should also be a reason for the city to exist at this location, such as a port or a road.

After which, @wisaac407 (wisaac407) added

    Yeah, I agree. It does look a little repetitive just having five houses duplicated over the entire scene, it needs some more prominent buildings. One thing that will help is adding the wall which I am working on right now. Also I still need to add some people and horses hear and there(that will be a tedious task  )

So @wisaac407 (wisaac407) replied

    It's been a while so I thought I would give an update. I found a pretty good horse model from here: http://download.lyndondaniels.com/ranchers/ (and a cow if I need one ;)). After cleaning up the horse model a bit(converting it to cycles, using hair particles for the mane and tail, etc.) I modeled a cart:
    
    For the cart I used the procedural wood material Bartek Skorupa showed at the blender conference(http://youtu.be/kAUmLcXhUj0) Then I modeled the harness. For the fabric parts of the harness I used a procedural cloth material:  
    [ATTACH=CONFIG]343305[/ATTACH]  
    Then for the weave texture:  
    [ATTACH=CONFIG]343306[/ATTACH]
    
    And the result:  
    [ATTACH=CONFIG]343307[/ATTACH]

After which, @wisaac407 (wisaac407) added

    I have also been working on the wall:  
    
    
    wall.jpg1920×1080 121 KB
    
      
      
    The towers I modeled and textured then placed them along the wall by hand(pretty simple). The wall is basically just a plane with a curve modifier with an image texture plugged into a diffuse shader. Ok it is actually a lot more complected then that. Because I wanted all the logs facing vertically I could not just have a plane with an array modifier and a curve modifier because then the logs would be facing the direction of the curve normal(not at all what I wanted). So I deleted half the vertices of the plane leaving me with one edge. I then added and applied an array and curve modifier to that object. Then I extruded all the edges up to create something that looked more like a wall. After that I simply selected everything and pressed ‘U' then ‘Reset' to reset the UV's of all the faces to fill the entire UV space. For the shader I actually used two different log textures and mixed between them using a noise texture, finally I added some noise textures on top of everything to break up the repetitiveness. This is a screen shot of the full material:  
    
    
    palisade_wall_two.blend.png1904×1001 226 KB
    
      
    
    
    The current version of the scene looks like this:  
    
    
    composited - final.jpg1920×1080 342 KB

To which @Oscar_J (Oscar J) replied

    It's suffering severely from lack of contrast. Is that mist covering the whole city, or why is everything so dull and grey?
    
    I'd prefer it looking something like this:
    
    pic.jpg1920×1080 233 KB
    
      
    
    
    Otherwise nice composition!

@mysteryBlends (mysteryBlends) replied

    Very good start indeed.  
    I think you could have a stronger light coming from the sun direction… would help achieve more contrast too.  
    The eye doen't know where to look at, so as it was suggested try adding a Fortress or some unique feature, and try to bring the viewer to it (lighting or shapes)

To which @Modron (Modron) replied

    looking good. chickens are a good livestock solution, imo, because they are easy to make, and they are white, so they stand out.

So @1up3d (1up3d) replied

    There is far to much green the buildings are being drowned out by it. the land looks undeveloped small fields and pastures for live stock should be visible developed land even then would look like patch work. there should be less and less grass the more densely pact the city gets people didn't have much use for grass in those days besides feeding livestock in which case it would be far more sparse inside the walls than outside. right now it looks as if the buildings magically appeared on the natural landscape overnight. Also the forest needs variation in color and the occasional rock out cropping would help. you're on the right track.

@wisaac407 (wisaac407) replied

    Thanks for the feedback everyone. I like the idea of chickens, because they would probably be free roaming I could just use a particle system to place them throughout the village. I do think that I need some kind of a larger building to balance out the scene, probably on the far hill side somewhere. Because it needs to be prominent I think it should be a stronghold.


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