Model of the greek city of Priene

[KyriakosCH]

While this is my first post, I have some experience with Blender, and currently I am creating part of the city of Priene. It was the polis of Bias, one of the seven sages of ancient Greece

 

Concept art I am using is (mostly) this one:

 

 

Current state of the polis is the following:

 

[KyriakosCH]

21 hours ago, KyriakosCH said:

 

 

And some progress... Do you like it?

Edited July 16, 2017 by KyriakosCH

[Stan`]

It looks nice !

Few questions:

What do you plan to do with it once it's finished ?

If you plan to put it in the game remember that you can't have meshes with more than 32.768 triangles. Else you have to split it.

If you want you can use the game textures to make it more realistic either Greek Roman or Seleucids texture atlases

Would you be willing to model specific buildings for the game ?

Do you have any experience with animation ?

I probably have some more questions but this is all I can think about right now. 

Keep it up.

 

[KyriakosCH]

Hi

 

I could try to turn it into a 0AD building, but I'd need some information on how to do that

 

I am fairly capable of doing so if it is similar to turning a model into a CivIV or similar games building, ie with niftools or something like that (?).

 

Textures may be an issue, given currently this is not uv-mapped, and I am not aware of 0AD texture conventions or anything else needed there (eg player colours?)

 

I can do some animation, though nothing very flashy. But minor movements I can do, yes

[Stan`]

Quote

I could try to turn it into a 0AD building, but I'd need some information on how to do that

Feel free to ask

Quote

I am fairly capable of doing so if it is similar to turning a model into a CivIV or similar games building, ie with niftools or something like that (?).

Here you just have to export tthe mesh to collada format (*.dae) and do some XML work.

Quote

Textures may be an issue, given currently this is not uv-mapped, and I am not aware of 0AD texture conventions or anything else needed there (eg player colours?)

Player color = alpha transparency of the png file you are using.

PNG files have to be power of two (eg. 1024x1024 512x512, etc...)

You can work with DDS but we avoid it because the game automatically converts pngs to dds so there is really no need to bother with that format.

Indeed you have to unwrap your models, and UVs have to be in the texture bounds, there is no texture tiling AFAIK.

 

 

[KyriakosCH]

^Then I suppose it will be far easier to model some sole other building, and uv-map it from the start Any particular building in mind? (as long as it is reasonably greek)

[Stan`]

Well here is what you could do. A lot of players complain about the similarity of greek buildings in the Athenian, Spartan and Macedonian civilizations, so you could try replace some with new ones ?

[Skhorn]

You could give more divertisty too, to the set of greek buildings

[KyriakosCH]

Ok, but any type of building in particular?

 

Are temples needed, or bouleyteria, or theatres or walls or something else?

 

I'd also need to know what the largest size in-game is, and also what the practical size where a building still has to look good is (cause modelling in a full 3d game creates issues which most people try to combat with skins, but i am a bit OCD and model-oriented )

 

Anyway, the temple of the Athena Polias (Athena of the Polis) is also placed now:

 

Edited July 16, 2017 by KyriakosCH

[Stan`]

You could do athen, spart, and mace, and temples,  As you can see they are pretty similar right now. Just make sure to keep dimensions roughly the same, so that it doesn't affect gameplay much, but stays the most accurate.

[KyriakosCH]

^Hm, does anyone have the blender (or compatible;  iirc blender can import DAE?) file of one of them, so I can just change stuff using a model i know already works?

[Stan`]

Here is the file. It's not the orginal, I'm not sure that file even exists, or it would probably be a 3dsmax format.

athen_temple_old.blend

[KyriakosCH]

Ok! I will have a look and see what i can do

[KyriakosCH]

3 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

Here is the file. It's not the orginal, I'm not sure that file even exists, or it would probably be a 3dsmax format.

athen_temple_old.blend

Ok, some notes:

 

-textures are very nice. Model is nice too (though some -imo; i am not a professional modeller though - strange/idiosynchratic face splitting there).

-only real issue is that the modeller has split his model to 2 parts (third part being simple, and has only a stone texture) which have a chaotic arrangement of texture uv-mapped, which means i'd have to re-arrange the file to work with what modelled bits already exist - or, alternatively, as i did for the time being, just use parts which have fixed mapped texture.

Something i did not like is that there is room only for 6 columns to the side, when you have 4 in front. Afaik the usual would be 7 to the side when you have 4 infront, and some pics of small hellenistic era temples have that setting. The following has 6x4 (due to the uv map work i avoided ). Nothing else changed; just took out some wall parts, moved the walled room to the back, took out two secondary columns and added 8 to the sides:

 

 

How different can the model end up looking? Does it have to use the current texture? How larger/smaller can it become? Taller/shorter?

Edited July 17, 2017 by KyriakosCH

[Lion.Kanzen]

Beautiful even in dark , @stanislas69 @niektb What you think guys?

[Stan`]

You can tear it apart and make a new one. You at least have to use one of the textures. If you use two you have to have two objects. 

For face split it's either because of smoothing groups or maybe he used some kind of mirror modifier.

[KyriakosCH]

Hm, quickest for me (assuming the model doesn't change massively) would be to make the columns a little smaller so as to allow for 7-4. Meant as a macedonian/hellenistic small temple. Eg the following is the concept:

 

[Stan`]

Sounds good. Looking forward to see what you can do

Keep in mind that all three temples will need to have unique features

[KyriakosCH]

 

Making sure it is as little work as possible ( ) and keeping what of the textures i could, do you think the above is passable?

[LordGood]

That is a Roman temple, careful with those pseudoperipteral columns, they are a dead giveaway of Roman architecture, rather than Greek

[Lion.Kanzen]

Indeed. This style Roman is more stylistic and Romans use other materials.

And romans some times uses Tuscan  order.

 

This folllow that evolve, but this one of many characteristic.

here are missing other columns order, like Minoan they creates his own style based in Egyptian.

Edited July 18, 2017 by Lion.Kanzen

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

On 7/16/2017 at 4:38 PM, stanislas69 said:

You could do athen, spart, and mace, and temples,  As you can see they are pretty similar right now. Just make sure to keep dimensions roughly the same, so that it doesn't affect gameplay much, but stays the most accurate.

 

These are already as accurate as you're going to get.

[LordGood]

I was thinking the Spartan's architecture could stray closer to early classical and use a warmer color stone

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

14 hours ago, LordGood said:

I was thinking the Spartan's architecture could stray closer to early classical and use a warmer color stone

You mean more Archaic I think, and I would support that direction actually, as long as it doesn't turn into something fanciful.

Spartans: Archaic architecture

Athenians: Classical architecture

Macedonians/Seleucids: Hellenistic architecture

[LordGood]

Archaic architecture is a tad extreme, the border between archaic and early classical will still have those heavy solid doric columns but less... sausagey...