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Construction 101 - Building a tavern from scratch.
raphaeldisanto
Member Posts: 402 Arc User
So, in my next quest, I needed a tavern. Being the kind of author I am, that meant I couldn't use one of the premade taverns or inns. Besides, my tavern needed a basement, and I didn't want to use the teleport trick. If anyone's played my current quest, you'll know that I build everything from scratch, because I feel it gives a far more immersive feel if you actually go down into a basement than if you just click on a door and get teleported to another area on the map.
Some of the other authors in the nw_foundry channel had been bugging me to do in-progress screenshots, and they thought that maybe it might be interesting for other authors if I made this thread that showed the creative process from start to finish in how to go about building a completely original building from scratch. I'll talk about the assets I used and the decisions I made while building this map.
I make no claims to being an expert builder or the 'best' map builder out there. But generally speaking, my maps have received fairly good responses and reviews. So, without further ado, here's how I went about building The Hart and Hound tavern:
edit: Unfortunately this will be broken up into more sections than I had originally wanted, just due to the forum posting limitations. The maximum number of screenshots I can include in each post is 4.
Some of the other authors in the nw_foundry channel had been bugging me to do in-progress screenshots, and they thought that maybe it might be interesting for other authors if I made this thread that showed the creative process from start to finish in how to go about building a completely original building from scratch. I'll talk about the assets I used and the decisions I made while building this map.
I make no claims to being an expert builder or the 'best' map builder out there. But generally speaking, my maps have received fairly good responses and reviews. So, without further ado, here's how I went about building The Hart and Hound tavern:
edit: Unfortunately this will be broken up into more sections than I had originally wanted, just due to the forum posting limitations. The maximum number of screenshots I can include in each post is 4.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by raphaeldisanto on
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So.. I started, as I always do for these building projects, with a flat open map. I used Flat Small, because 512x512 is more than enough space to build a building in. There's no need for more.
Then, since I'm building a building, I started as a real architect would, with the basement/foundations.
Now, you can't dig holes in the ground, which means that our 'ground level' will actually be above what the Foundry calls Y=0.. I'm not sure what it will be at this point. All I know is that it'll be at whatever height my basement walls end up being.
We start with the basement on the ground and I decided that I wanted a rocky, dirty floor to the basement, so I used the rocks with the dirt texture, laying them out and embedding them into the ground in the rough layout of the floor plan of the tavern:
At this point I haven't decided which assets I'm going to use for the walls yet, but that's the next part of laying the foundations for the building. If this was an older, more ruined place, I'd be tempted to use Vellosk walls or the dungeon walls, since they have both complete and ruined versions, but this is just a regular tavern in a run-down-ish district of Neverwinter. There may be some cracks, but nothing to warrant the ruined versions of those assets.
So I decided to go with the dwarven walls, but reversed. The backside of the dwarven walls are flat grey stone that looks aged and good for a basement.
The second screenshot shows the gap that I left in the walls in a corner. That's always a good idea so that you can get back inside your building if you end up outside it. I had to use that gap a lot when I was building the upper floors and fell through to the ground, hehe. Can't wait for flycam!
You can see that I have a set of stone steps in the corner there. I decided that that's where my stairs up to the "ground" floor of the tavern will go. But the stone steps aren't fixed yet. They're just there so I can get an idea of what it might look like.
Also, you'll see that my basement is square when I have a non-square foundation of dirt rocks. I placed the rocks outside the walls to give me an idea of the layout for the actual tavern in the 2D editor. It's also a bit of a buffer if I find I'm running out of resources later on. I can delete those with no problem.
Next thing is the ceiling, of course. Since the Dwarven Walls looked so good as the walls, I thought I'd use them as a the ceiling too. This way, I also maintain artistic continuity between the way the walls look and the way the ceilings look.
You can see in the first screenshot that the dwarven walls have been placed in their ceiling positions, but the 2D editor doesn't show them flat. The 2D editor only shows rotation for objects in the y-axis, not in the x or z-axes. It can make the 2D editor look quite odd as you progress. You'll also notice that a lot of both the walls and the ceiling project beyond the bounds of the actual basement floor itself. That's okay, because when the player's inside the building they can't see the outside. They'll never know.
In the third screenshot you can see the hole that I left in the ceiling for the staircase.
And then in the fourth screenshot you can see what it looks like from above, with the flipped over dwarven walls. I knew that I would be covering that with a wooden floor for the actual tavern's ground floor, so what it looks like isn't important.
So, the stone stairs were an idea that didn't work, and cryptic don't give us very many staircase options, so my choices were fairly limited. I eventually decided to go with the wooden stairs from the prebaked noble house.
As you can see, however, they have no texture underneath, but that's a problem that's easy to solve. I just used a bunch of those partition walls and filled in the gaps.
Okay, that's the basic basement architecture finished, time to move up a floor and work on the ground floor. Generally, the way I build is I lay down the base architecture then go back and decorate later.
Cryptic give us a bunch of different options for wooden floors, although some of them require more work than others. There's the pirate skyhold decking for floors that are rotted and ruined. Overlaying a bunch of those gives you a really nice decayed wood floor look. You can use the top of the tavern bar pieces for a more polished, classier hardwood floor look, but for 'standard' wood, your best bet is probably Human Trim 06. It's beveled on the edges, so you probably want to flip it over and use the underside. Luckily, it has texture on both sides.
The third screenshot shows a step that I was forced to put in. The stairs didn't quite come up as high as I had wanted to meet the level of the wooden floor and it was giving companions trouble when trying to follow the player upstairs, so I used a bookcase, flipped it over, and embedded it into the floor, to create that half-step. The bookcase, like many other assets, sticks out of the wall but again, we can't see it from inside so it doesn't matter.
Also, because the dwarven wall pieces that I used for the ceiling are so thick, you can't tell that the bookcase projects into the basement space.
The 2D view shows that I haven't yet extended my wooden floor over the "sticky-out" bits of the floor plan. Obviously, I'll have to do that before I put the walls up. But that's the next step.
Adding walls to the floor is basically the same as adding the walls to the basement. You just pick the wall you want and lay 'em out. Remember, players won't normally be able to see the outside of your building, so you don't have to size the dimensions of the building to match the walls exactly. In this building, that's not exactly true, but we'll get to that later.
In the 2nd and third screenshot you can see I have a doorway ready for a door. Cryptic don't really give us any decent doorways, so I cheat. I'll describe that in the next post.
So, doorways. Always a problem in custom-built houses, because we don't have too many options for normal-sized doors, and even fewer for doorways that fit 'em.
In fact, the only piece we have that has a proper doorway is the Human Interior Movable Wall Doorway, but that's fixed as part of the two-tone human interior walls. However, all is not lost!. You can cheat by covering up everything except the doorway.
The first screenshot shows the human interior doorway as I placed it into the map. You can see that it absolutely doesn't match. However, the wall that it's attached to is narrower than the partition walls, so we can hide it. That said, the wooden beams at each end are not, so what we end up doing is doubling up on the partition walls to make a double-thickness wall.
Depending on what wall you use, you don't have to do this - For example the doublesided Vellosk wall is already double thickness, so it'll cover both the human interior wall and the wooden beam in one shot.
Placing the door can be tricky - You can't move interactable doors in 3D mode, so you can't place it by hand the way you normally would. However, the asset anchorpoints are set up so that if you duplicate the doorway's X, Y and Z coords from the properties box and copy them into the door's X, Y and Z coords, it should line up exactly where you want it.
Then you just overlay a few more of the partition walls to cover up as much of the human interior wall as you want. Thankfully, the partition walls come in a bunch of different sizes to make it easier.
The main walls that I was using for the tavern were the 40x40 walls, but to step around the doorway, I used some of the smaller 20x20 walls, positioning them by hand in the 3D edit mode just enough to avoid those unsightly texture collisions. The bricks won't always line up, but there's only so much we can do. We work with what we have.
So, you remember that earlier I said that it didn't matter what your building looked like from the outside, because the players weren't really likely to ever see it from the outside. That's generally true whenever I build a custom interior and while it's possible to build a custom house so that it works both inside and out, you're very limited by trying to make everything line up and that can definitely stifle creativity.
But that doesn't mean we have to live in a box. By using overlapping walls, we can create holes in our walls. Line the windows with some wooden beams and we have windows!
Simple windows, admittedly, but windows nonetheless. The beams are Wood Beam 01, and they're an asset I use -everywhere-. As a simple standard wooden beam, they're almost infinitely flexible and usable for all kinds of purposes.
Well, now that we have windows, we'd best place something outside for the player to look at. This is a Tavern in neverwinter, so we're talking about a city street here. A week or so ago, I played @lovepeas' excellent 2nd quest in her Nightmares campaign (I highly recommend you check it out) and learned that she'd used the Nw Pe Bridge Castlewall Wall pieces for her stone city floor/street. If you need a non-uniform street - for example if you want to make it slighjtly ruined, with grass and mud coming up through holes in the stone - you'll need something like the Vellosk floors or other smaller tiles because they offer more flexibility.
But if you just need a big flat stone floor type thing, the Bridge Castlewall piece is excellent. It's huge (501x835 feet) and only costs 1 asset. Also, because it's so big, the anchor handle for it is usually miles away from anywhere you are, which means that you're unlikely to tag it by accident and fall through it.
So I placed it at the right height for where my "ground" is supposed to be and flipped it 90 degrees to make it horizontal. But in the first screenshot you'll see that I actually ended up using two, because obviously, we do have to go "below ground" into the basement, so I couldn't have it slicing through the tavern itself.
Then I just went outside and placed some buildings from the asset set and placed them in a vaguely street-y type position. But since we now have a solid city street floor and some buildings, we can also go ahead and put people out there. Street vendors, passers-by, all that sort of thing, just to add some local color to the view outside of the windows.
The third picture shows how far I bothered laying external buildings down. There was no need to place any more in that direction, since the player can't see down there. And then the fourth screenshot shows a different window shape and size. By rearranging the way the walls overlap, you can create any kinds of rectangular windows you want.
And now the ground outside the tavern looks like ground, even though we're 45 feet in the air!
Hehe, thanks. I just gain inspiration from the other great builders here like Zovya and Apoc and then try and figure out how best to user the assets Cryptic have given us to achieve what I want to achieve in terms of the set design of my maps.
But if you like what you see, feel free to PM me and I'll send you the shortcode for the quest I currently have live, Lost Little Lambs (Part 1 in the campaign of which is this part 2). I don't really have it in my sig or a thread for it anywhere because I'm not really one for advertising. I only made this thread because @DeeSauter said she'd yell at me if I didn't, LOL
Alright, so now we have our base architecture for the building itself, and we have a street outside that looks vaguely street-ish. The building doesn't have a roof yet, but I usually leave that until last because it's hard enough to edit stuff without the roof getting in the way.
So it's time to decorate the interior of the tavern. This part can take a long time, so I'll just throw some screenshots in here and you guys can see what I'm doing, the direction I'm going.
I wanted a balcony type thing, the way the prefab inn has a balcony, but Cryptic don't give us any really good wooden planks to use, and since I have windows now, it's not possible for me to use Human Trim 06 again. If I didn't have windows, I'd have used something like the trim pieces and just had them sticking out of the wall, but obviously, that won't look right with the windows.
I eventually settled on the walkways from Pirate's Skyhold. They're more rickety than I wanted, but they'll suffice. This tavern isn't in the highest-class area of Neverwinter, after all.
If you're wondering what those steps are - Yes, they're custom-built. I used Gate Latch Wood 01, because it was the closest piece of wood that was the right size, shape and color for what I wanted. I embedded the actual "latch" part into the wall. Keen eyes will spot yet more wooden beams used as stair supports.
I lucked out with the supports. Since I have human trim 06 as the tavern floor, and then the Dwarven walls as the basement ceiling, there's actually a significant amount of vertical space between the tavern floor and the basement itself, so I could embed the beams vertically into the floor without them poking out into the basement.
In fact, there's obviously a gap between the wooden floor at the dwarven ceiling - Also the dwarven ceiling pieces don't have flat sides, since they have geometry on their "fronts". This was visible as you walked down the stairs, so I was forced to cover it up with a bunch of stone. I used Dwarven Wall 50ft Top Piece01, 3 or 4 times before I got it to look exactly the way I wanted:
(You can see that that's a shot leading down into the basement because you can still see the corner gap in my wall that I pointed out earlier. Yes, it's still there, and yes I still use it when I fall off, haha)
"Hah! You are doomed! You're only armed with that pathetic excuse for a musical instrument!!!" *the Savage Beast moments before Lonnehart the Bard used music to soothe him... then beat him to death with his Fat Lute*
I've done flat roofs and angled roofs before, but this tavern's pretty big so I'm expecting to need to do a combination of both. I'll keep you all posted as I go!
Hahah, yes. Not much we can do about that, alas.
"Hah! You are doomed! You're only armed with that pathetic excuse for a musical instrument!!!" *the Savage Beast moments before Lonnehart the Bard used music to soothe him... then beat him to death with his Fat Lute*
I recovered the floor of the Tavern itself by using the "Village Building Larg Destroyed Foundation 01" (No, that's not a typo. It really is "Larg", not "Large" and added a ton of decorations. We're currently looking at around 1250 assets.
@Runis12 was kind enough to take some video of a little look-see that I gave some Authors the other night. The stream can be found on her twitch.tv channel:
http://www.twitch.tv/sillybard12/b/442941029
Feel free to take a look around. She walks all around the tavern, including the outside and walks on the fake city street I built. She also has some nice birds-eye perspective shots of the outside and the ceiling, so you can see just how ugly things look from the outside.
The Lost Keep NW-DS1XBAK7D An experiment Daily Foundry
The Ruined Temple NW-DBHC7MUBL Latest and last one Daily Foundry
In my Pt. 3 there is a 3 level house. I noticed right off that the house would empty out to your location whenever you used certain AOE attacks.
If you are going to do this and have encounters, you will need to install invisible walls inside the floors. I suggest doing it as you go because I had a hell of a time adding them after it was complete.
It worked for the most part, but some attacks still seemed to burst through the invisible sections in non-repeatable occurrences, so either they were not lined up as well as I hoped or they failed at times. Turning on the encounters as needed instead of everything Immediate will resolve this.
Try the invisible walls first.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
1- 20, 2- 35, 3- 18, 4- 20 min
Comments to -> the Book Binding
I remember you talking about that on vent with Zovya, Drum
There's only one spot where encounters happen and it's in the basement area in the fighting pit (which itself will have invisible walls around it) except for the spot where the player gets in and due to the way the quest works, the encounters will be spawn-on-demand.
First up, from the door - the first thing you'll see as you enter. The entrance lobby, complete with Brennan the Bouncer, obviously slacking off, because he's leaning against a wall.
The observant amongst you will note that the floor no longer looks like Human Trim 06. That's because I pulled it out and replaced it all with the destroyed village building floor, as mentioned in this post. I think the way the planks are in the destroyed floor makes for a far better raggedy tavern floor. If this was more upscale, I might have left it with the trim floor.
A view from the balcony, back towards the entrance. Using the destroyed building floor actually made the pirate skyhold pieces that I used for the balcony seem far more fitting, so that's another benefit of using that piece.
We can take a quick peek out of the window here and see Neverwinter citizens and guards going about their business.
And then the backroom, which -is- more upscale and private:
I covered up the stone walls with the stucco and put in some nicer decor in here. The chairs are the nicer variant, there's rugs all over the floor, etc etc. It's hard to see from this screenshot, but I didn't lay the destroyed village floor in here for that exact reason.
And now if we go downstairs, we can see what those stairs actually look like in the finished product.
Down in the basement, there's been quite some work done, but really it's all just decor. The overall base of the basement (no pun intended) is still the same rocky dirt that it was before:
This is supposed to be an illegal fighting arena, so we have the barricades and boxes for people to stand on. But it's also still used as a storage area for the tavern itself, so there's tables and chairs stacked against a wall, and shelves and stuff. The tavern staff just (mostly) don't come down here when there's a match on.
However, you'll see that, as befits a fighting pit, the center section is actually lower than the rest of the basement. This is simply an example of things changing as you go through the process. I decided that the pit would look much better if it was actually pit-like. However, the dirt rocks were pretty much already at ground level and as mentioned before, you can't dig holes in the default terrain.
So I simply raised everything else up by 10 feet or so. I had to do this manually, in the 3D editor, because (as you'll see), there's practically no way to tell which asset is which in the 2D editor. Thankfully, my basement was 40 feet tall, which left me some vertical height to work with. So now the basement's only 30 feet tall and I have a ten-foot deep pit in the middle of it. I think it worked out far better than the flat floor I had before.
The last thing I did was make the basement much darker than the upstairs. The global sky is PE Sunset, which gave the tavern itself a slightly dusky, smoky ambience which was nice, but the basement needed to be much darker and more sinister.
To achieve this, I used a 500x500 heavy black skyfade, but of course that made the entire Tavern darker. So I placed it underground. The "floor" of the Tavern is around 45 feet above ground. This Skyfade is 500x500, and the anchor point is in the center of the effect, which means that there's around 250 feet above the anchor and 250 below the anchor.
So I placed the Skyfade at -250 and went from there, increasing the height (decreasing the negative value) until I got it to only affect the basement. For my use, the magic number for the Y-value was -210. Combined with the raising of the floor to create the actual fighting pit, when you're in the pit, fighting, I think it's definitely atmospheric:
Final counts:
Detail: 1500/1500
Actor: 82/500
NPC: 50/50
And this is what the 2D Editor looks like:
Many of those red encounter dots are guard encounters used to populate the environment. I ran out of non-combat NPCs (because 50 really isn't very many, especially given that you have to duplicate them if you're using them for multiple quest objectives), so I ended up supplanting them with friendly Guard Encounters.
The only fighting happens in the pit, so I can use guard encounters to patrol the streets outside the tavern. The big mass of red in the bottom right corner are more guard encounters. They're enclosed in a 40x40 invisible wall tube.
When tuning fights, I like to pick and choose from the available encounters in the toolset. That means I often have straggler mobs left over that I don't want to use. I toss those in there with all those guards who make very short work of them, thus ensuring that my "Kill enemies" objective is completed when the player defeats the mobs that I actually place in the playable area of the map.
I tend to use overkill for the 'spare mob' killing encounters because.. Well, firstly: Why not? I've got the spare encounters, it's not like I'm backing up against the limit of 500. Secondly, Having that many ensures that the spare mobs I toss in there die before the player kills the mobs he or she is facing, thus ensuring that the objective will complete the instant players kill their mobs, and they won't have to wait for the guards to finish and thirdly, because it's better safe than sorry. Better to have too many guards there than too few and risk the mobs getting a lucky strike and killing the guards, which would render that objective uncomplete-able.
--Raph
The shortcode is: nw-dsgjbnsxb
The version that's published is the exact same version that I've been working on, including the author tricks such as holes in the wall and teleporters to allow me to get to places that I wouldn't normally be able to get to. I did remove all of the NPCs and encounters, since this is a non-quest version and they're really not relevant to the map as an example of one way to construct a hand-built custom multi-level interior.
Feel free to check it out and take a walk around and if there's any questions at all about assets in the map, or techniques that I used don't hesitate to post here, or send me a forum PM or whatever. As anyone who's been in the nw_foundry channel knows, I'm more than willing to answer questions about the map.