I am trying to make a town.

Cosmic Average · Post by **Cosmic Average** » 2010-01-03 08:31pm

I haven't modeled in a while.

I am having trouble making a town.

salm · Post by **salm** » 2010-01-04 08:37am

What exactly is the trouble you´re having?
What is the town for, stills, animation or realtime rendering?

Thanas · Post by **Thanas** » 2010-01-04 09:09am

What kind of town is this supposed to be?

Cosmic Average · Post by **Cosmic Average** » 2010-01-04 05:25pm

Well, I was trying to make a low-poly fantasy medieval city so that I could use it to digitally paint. Like this guy, who went from this to this.

Unfortunately, I don't really know how to compose a scene and my computer can't really handle the same number of polygons... It's sadly near its limit as it is. I totally wanted to put in a river.

lPeregrine · Post by **lPeregrine** » 2010-01-04 05:58pm

Two suggestions:

1) Render in layers, that way you can keep the poly count for each layer low enough for your computer to handle. Then you just put it all together in your favorite 2d program when it's all done. Since you want to use this as just a guide to paint over, you don't even have to worry too much about matching it 100% perfectly.

2) Use proxy models. If the issue is system resources while editing the scene, replace everything but the object you're working on with a simple box as a placeholder. That way you can work on scene composition and be sure it all fits, but you keep the resource demands to a minimum until you're ready to do the final renders.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2010-01-05 12:28am

Use Google Earth to get a sense of the layout of real Medieval villages. I know there are some well-preserved ones in France, and France is well-covered by Google Earth. I faced a similar problem in SimCity 4 when I tried to make realistic container ports; satellite photos of the real thing really gave me a sense of how they're laid out and how the various components relate to one another.

Thanas · Post by **Thanas** » 2010-01-05 11:25am

Cosmic Average wrote:Well, I was trying to make a low-poly fantasy medieval city so that I could use it to digitally paint. Like this guy, who went from this to this.

Unfortunately, I don't really know how to compose a scene and my computer can't really handle the same number of polygons... It's sadly near its limit as it is. I totally wanted to put in a river.

A few things jump out - the towers at the wall should be a bit more spaced out, the bell tower should have smaller windows (for example, this is the one from Siena). The most critical issue however are the walls IMO, they are to high with too little width and cluttered with far too many towers. The ancient babylonians would built walls like that, but no medieval fortress designer worth his salt would do so. The reason for that is that those high walls with little structural support behind them are quite susceptiple to siege weaponry or mining.

salm · Post by **salm** » 2010-01-05 01:49pm

Cosmic Average wrote:Well, I was trying to make a low-poly fantasy medieval city so that I could use it to digitally paint. Like this guy, who went from this to this.

Unfortunately, I don't really know how to compose a scene and my computer can't really handle the same number of polygons... It's sadly near its limit as it is. I totally wanted to put in a river.

Ah, i see. The way i do things like that is that i first think about what my scene should look like, then model it very roughly (one box per house) and simultaniously set up the camera. And don´t forget to set up the format of the scene. A 3:4 image has different requirements than a 16:9 image for example.
After this is done i don´t change the camera anymore or make only minor changes to it.
Now you can start modelling the real scene. This way you only have to model what the camera sees and can skip the rest. this saves a lot of work and polygons.

If you don´t know what makes a good scene just look at good photos in the internet of similar scenes and then set your scene up in the same way.

If you are going to paint over it later on you can make the scene very low poly. You´ve got way too many edges in there to be reasonable. You can probably reduce the polycount 70 percent.

Like other people mentioned look at refernce photos and blueprints a lot. I know you probably don´t want to copy something and be creative yourself, however, studying reference photos gives you a good guide of what looks believable and what doesn´t.

Concerning your computers performance: Can´t you just hide the parts you´re not working on?

And of course the obvious: Make different types of houses instead of copy&pasting the same one several times.

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