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Styleguide Vol.II: Houses
22.01.2003 von Manstein[MLD]

Want to map an European city in the time of the Second World War? But you have no idea on how to make it? Ok, let me introduce you to this kind of architecture. I’m not a professional architect, so I cannot give you a 100% correct overview. But for the purpose of mapping, it will be enough.
So, let’s start right off! What we should first be thinking of, is the location and type of House we want to create. In this style guide I will cover houses that you find in cities or villages. They have mostly 2 or more floors.


This one has got 4 floors and would stand in the inner circle of a town. Let’s take a house with 3 floors. Each floor has a highness of 192 WU´s (World Units). Normally the ground floor of houses built at the beginning of the 20th century, was made of bricks or stones. They weren’t plastered like the upper floors. So, let’s do it the same.

1. The ground floor:
Make a brush 832 WU´s high and 448 WU´s long and 312 WU´s wide. Texture it with the caulk-texture. Next, make another brush (let’s call it wall) with the caulk-texture, 192 WU´s high, 448 WU´s long and 8 WU´s wide and place it in front of the first brush. Hit Escape to deselect it. Keep the SHIFT and the STRG keys pressed and select the front face of this brush. Give it the texture algiers/brick1. Ok, now we have the base of our house, but there are no windows/doors in it. Let us do them later.

2. The 1st floor:

Make another wall upon the wall of the ground floor. Again, press the SHIFT and the STRG key to select only the front face. Give it the texture general_structure/plaster_wall2a.

3. The 2nd floor:
Our last floor before we construct the roof. Repeat step 2.

What we have now is the basic shape of our house without the roof. There is a texture transition that doesn’t look that good: From ground floor to the first floor. We mask it with a trim. That’s not unusual and it loosen the front of the house a bit. For this cause we make a brush as long as the house front (448 WU´s), 24 WU´s high and 8 WU´s wide. Keep it selected and press E. Move one edge of the brush 16 WU´s up.

Now it should look like this.

Next, draw a brush 448 WU´s long, 4 WU´s high and 4 WU´s wide. Place it like shown on the image below:

Texture all visible faces with this texture: algiers/doccrtset_1b

Ok, we got the trim and now we are going to add the door and the windows. For the windows I chose a not masked window texture, because the house cannot be entered: general_structure/denmark_1

Make a brush for the window 64 WU´s long, 96 WU´s high and 8 WU´s wide. Select only the front face and give it the window texture. Fit the texture to the brush. Now place this window in the ground floor brush with the brick texture about 48 WU´s above the ground and 64 WU´s away from the edge. Cut a hole into the ground floor brush with the same dimensions as the window. Place the window into this hole.


Deselect everything except the window and copy it. Move the copy of the window to the other edge of the house, place it again 64 WU´s away from the edge and 48 WU´s away from the ground.


The door will be placed exact in the middle between the two windows. Make a brush 64 WU´s long, 128 WU´s high and 8 WU´s wide. Give it the general_structure/door_rorng2 texture and fit it to the brush. Cut another hole to the ground floor wall brush and place the door there. You may want to give the door a frame. Also add a trigger use in front of the door, open its properties by hitting “N” and give it the key/value: targetname/door_locked.


Now instead of the ground floor, we will only add three of these windows to the first and second floor.
That’s how it should look like when we are ready to begin with the roof.

The roof:
Change to the 2d window where you can see the side of your house. Mark the big caulk-brush and clip it like a roof:


Now, make a brush 448 WU´s long, 256 WU´s high and 8 WU´s wide.


Hit “E” while this brush is still selected and move the upper edges to the edge of our triangle roof and pull the lower end some WU´s deeper:


Make the roof brush 8 WU´s longer at each side than the house. Give the whole brush the general_structure/plank_flat texture and adjust it at the sides. A rotation to 60 degrees should make the texture align well to the face.


Select this roof brush, hit the spacebar to copy it and adjust it to the other side of your roof.
There you will have to adjust the texture at the sides again. Hit “S” to open the texture properties dialogue again. Where it says “Rotation” enter –60. At the end move the camera back to the front of your house, select the big face of your roof brush, that is still caulked, select the face and give it the general_structure/shinglesml1 texture.
So much for the roof. Now we need to add some more detail to the house to make it look better.

First: The gerianne. Take this texture for it: general_industrial/jh_barrel3. Now make a brush using this texture 8 WU´s long, 8 WU´s wide and 464 WU´s high. Turn it into a cylinder and rotate it in the x-direction, so that it is parallel to the edge of the roof. Adjust it to this edge. Hit the spacebar again to copy the cylinder and rotate it in the x-direction again. Stretch it to 624 WU´s. Place the copy of the gerianne at one side of the house:


Now make another, dense, cylinder and shape it in the vertex mode like this:

So much for this detail.

Next, the roof windows. Make a caulk brush that is 64 WU´s long, 64 WU´s high and 64 WU´s wide. Select the front face and texture it with general_structure/denmark_1. Now move that brush, so that the lower corner lays on the bevel of the roof brush:


Hit “X” to activate the clip-mode and clip away the part of our window brush that reaches into the roof:


Texture the sides of the window again with our previous used wood texture.
Paste and copy this window brush and place it them same as the other windows before:

The last think our house needs is a chimney. Make a brush 24 WU´s long, 152 WU´s high and 40 WU´s wide. Give it the brick-texture algiers/brick1 and cut away the part of the brush that reaches into the roof.

Ok, we are nearly finished! Make sure, that all invisible faces are textured with caulk. Than select the whole house (without the trigger) and make it detail. That’s it. If you made everything like described above (and I hope I described everything right), than your house should look like this:


You can use any texture that might suite you. Also you can add some attachments, like bays, oriels, or small towers. This is just an example!

Have fun

Manstein

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