Environment PreProduction

Medieval Village Preproduction

For one of my Final Major Projects in my final University year I will be making a Medieval style fantasy 'village in the mountain'. In my preproduction I designed arguably the most important building in the whole village: The tavern. 

After the usual image research, I got started my own designs by drawing some silhouettes of different buildings. The idea was to try and get the building looking interesting without the use of colour or too much detail.

After this I took each silhouette, added line detail and coloured them in traditional medieval cream walls and dark wood timbers. I started with the two similar looking buildings. I like the wonky element I added to Tavern 01, and the chimney I put on the side of Tavern 02. 

Tavern 03 is my least favourite design, though I like the tower at the back. If I did this design in future, I would adapt it slightly to incorporate the tower better, as it looks stuck on as an afterthought. I might even turn it into some sort of windmill and make it taller. 

 Taverns 04 and 05 look quite similar in design. I like them both but don't feel as though they have an overly 'Tavern' feel like the others. There wouldn't be a wide enough floor space in any one area to have a communal feel to the inside. Tavern 04 would probably work better as a market area, and Tavern 05 could work as a small set of houses, though I like the square tower in the corner. 

This is the final design I chose. It is an adaptation of Tavern 02. I chose this one because It would host a huge square footage inside, giving the room for a large number of tables and a big communal bar. It would also be able to host several guest rooms upstairs and a couple of 'private meeting rooms' out the back. It would also look like one of the largest buildings in the village, which is handy when all residents will be there on a nightly basis. 

I then took my design into Maya and did a quick block out of the building, just to make sure it would hold up in 3D and not look too boring. With a little tweaking it started to look quite good. When I get into proper development however, I will make the walls a bit more wonky like in design 01, to give it a more fantasy 'top heavy' feel.

I then went into finer detail, looking into the different types of tiles I could put on the roof. In the end I went for the plain square ones, as it is more practical than the diamond and the straw, and not as flouncy as the scalloped.

After deciding on the tiles, I looked into other variations: Whether I wanted a flat roof or a pointy one, the different chimneys I could make use of and a doodle of a dome i'd seen on some buildings around my house.

This is the final building design, based on the dimensions in the previz. I added all the timber detail and the windows. I went with a simple diamond shaped metal cross hatch for the windows, as I worked in an old pub once with windows like that and I always liked them. 

 Final Turnaround