[WIPz] Fortified Manor

[Dwip]

So, this may or may not turn into something actually resembling a Skyrim mod, or anything resembling a finished product at all, but I've been working on a fortified manor house in the Whiterun style for a while now in Blender, and I feel like showing it off, so here we are.

 

For those of you from back in the day, this is very roughly based on Bremberthwaite Manor from the classic AD&D Castle Guide.  Always my favorite thing from that book, I've always wanted to make a 3D version of it, and now I am, with...changes.

 

 

First rough exterior shot.  It's a bit hard to make out, but you can see the fortified entry sticking out a bit.  Also, if you wondered why almost nothing in Skyrim has proper battlements, it's because battlements are really hard.

 

Wireframe is for rough outline at this stage.  You can better see my process for going from floorplan->wireframe->detail here. I didn't start screenshotting things until fairly late this time around.

This is the stack for the spiral stairs. The math behind spiral stairs turns out to be pretty non-trivial - you have to get the rise right, an arc that works, and you have to make them easily navigable by a player, which means making them bigger than they might actually be in reality. Ultimately I had to completely rework the height of the entire building to get the stairs correct.

Figuring this out was probably the hardest part of the whole project thus far.

Rough tower exteriors. You can kind of see where I'm going with the roof stuff. The angled battlements here were really, REALLY annoying to do correctly, but eventually turned out ok. You'll note that I only made 3 sides worth in this shot - later on, I'll copy them around the various tower angles to save me a bunch of work.

And here's the slightly more complete towers integrated with the main building. We'll be doing roof stuff in a moment. You can also see the entryway and a sort of floating Staticman in front of it - Staticman is actually at 0 elevation, and the walls extend a little bit below that to account for variations in landscape height.

This is the more or less complete exterior mesh. I'm not entirely happy with either tower roof, but those will do for the moment.

You can also see the roof on the main hall poking through the tower wall somewhat. That's me cheating, because I didn't really need the pain of trying to figuring out the really complex angles of that section.

This is a very rough interior wireframe, with the stairs stack added in to show how it's going to integrate with everything else.

Switching gears slightly, this is something I really wanted to do - window seat alcoves for the tower windows, based on something I saw at the Tower of London. Photos I took in the Tower of London and Carlisle Castle have been my main photo references for this project.

And this is how those alcoves are going to fit into the towers.

Speeding ahead a bit, I faced a bit of a conundrum trying to figure out how to do interior ceilings for the various tower levels - originally they were going to be stone, but I couldn't make them look right, so I switched to wood. Only, the only place in all of Whiterun architecture that does ceilings of this type is the underside of the balconies in Dragonsreach, so I had to get inventive.

You'll also note me being a lot more spartan with detail than Bethesda meshes. This is in line with my reference photographs, which feature a lot less of the trim and other detail that mark even the lowest class Beth meshes. While I generally try to fit in with Beth's aesthetic choices (things look better in-game that way), this was one I believed strongly in. Thus, instead of giant wooden pillars like most Beth Whiterun meshes have, I went with those round supports for the large beams. It'll work out once I start filling things up.

This is a different angle on the same room I just showed you. That fireplace is based on an unused one Beth did for Whiterun. You can also see some slightly different windows because this is the ground floor.

Also, no trim between the floor and the wall. I've never actually seen that done anywhere in the wild.

This is the mostly complete tower stack with wood floors, ceilings, and the whole thing. In a significant modification from the original plans, I've added a couple of hallways in here to avoid the whole guards tromping through the bedroom thing. I'm also stripping the window seats out in favor of possibly more multi-use alcoves once we get into the CK part of things.

Current WIP shot showing the tower stacks in with the as of yet not really started interior. You can see where there's going to be a really big set of three windows at one end of the building, and I've added another alcove off of what will eventually be the second floor balcony.

More to come as I tinker.

[AndalayBay]

Looking very cool so far.

[Dwip]

In which there was MOAR UV MAPPING.

This is the main hall, minus the roof, which I haven't figured out quite yet, and the trim which we'll get to later.

The obvious exciting bit was the balcony railing, but the hardest part there was figuring out how to space everything out. Once I got that, it was about 5 minutes to get everything in position.

I really hope that big window is as awesome in-game as I want it to be.

[Arthmoor]

UV map all the UVs.....

 

This is looking really cool. I want one

[Dwip]

And the more or less completed roof, which presented some issue because it's rather significantly different from every other roof in Whiterun. Couldn't add any supports because of all the other stuff in the way, so I did a couple crossbeams and called it a day. Think it still looks ok.

Next up, a whole hell of a lot of highly annoying trim.

[Dwip]

And now for the fruits of today's labors.

This is the more or less final exterior, with brick decals applied, and some of the roof trim removed because I didn't like it.

I felt like the one interior wall needed to be broken up some, so I added another window. Chose not to do brick decals inside.

Starting to run out of things to model, here.

[Donnato]

[Dwip]

For which we have striven these many months.

So, finally finished up or at least came close to all of the major mesh work for this. Threw it in the game near Whiterun to make sure everything worked.

Everything works, though I need to do some more tinkering with the moss. Way too square. Think I know how to fix that, though I may not bother. Also need to do some things related to smoothing and the like.

Since my interiors and exteriors are very close to a 1:1 match, unlike Beth's stuff, that meant I could place everything in the air like that and do a walkthrough. So...

This is the main hall, looking towards the tower end of the manor. The crazy doorway gaps are where things don't quite match up between the interior/exterior.

Yeah, that balcony looks as cool as I wanted it to look. Happy.

The ground floor of the tower, looking back towards the main room to the right and into the stairway to the left.

Standing on the balcony looking towards the great window. Which does indeed look like I wanted. I'll need to figure out some lighting, but it'll work.

One of the upper floors in the tower. I wanted cozy here and I think I'm going to pull it off.

And standing on the top of the tower looking back at Whiterun.

 

:bunny: :bunny: