OpenPatrician Game Art

I’m in the process of putting a game together. The game is OpenPatrician, a medieval commerce simulation in northern Europe. Almost all visual components are rendered images - naturally rendered with Blender.
In this thread I will present the different models made for this game. Though I consider all the models presented here as finished, I’m well aware that for a real artist they would still need much work. Therefore I should point out some things:

  • I’m not an artist
  • My patience is limited, meaning even if I can see how a model could be improved still further I won’t do it, if it is sufficient for my needs
  • I use the rendered images and not the models them self
  • There are no closeup shots of any of the models (at least until now)

Of course all the above may change, at least in the perspective of the game, if someone with real artistic talent takes an interest. Some of the models are available over at BlendSwap, I will make certain to point them out. The rest is in the repository of the game with a CC-BY-NC license attached. They are non-comercial due to the use of texture images from different sources, which do not allow it. I will have to make sure these models have the proper license attached, so I can link them here.


Early on it was clear, that I needed a vessel to transport goods in it. One such a vessel is a wooden barrel. I believe this was my first model done in Blender. Therefore I have different versions of a barrel hanging around. I recently redid it for two reasons:

  • Setting up the model as a Cycles render
  • Use only free textures

The first version was done based on a tutorial over at Blender Cookie. This was of course with Blender 2.49. So I had to figure out where all the switches went in 2.5. I had a hell of a time (and still have) with texture panting. To me it seems, as if on some days it just works and the other it does not. So if anyone knows a good tutorial (video preferably) detailing the process of cloning from one UV Map to another, I would appreciate it greatly.
This model is available at BlendSwap. If you compare that model with the technique shown in the aforementioned Cookie tutorial you will see that the texturing is greatly simplified. Instead of texturing one plank and then texture paint it with different UV Maps I only unwrapped it once and mapped it to an appropriate texture, which seems to have creases between planks. For more realism I could add some bump to the texture.

This is another model from the early days, and I must say it is my worst. The bale is another vessel for transporting goods. The goods are wrapped in cloth and bound together with a rope. With the cloth I’m pretty content, the rope however is another matter.
I did not improve the model since it will never be used in a high enough resolution where these deficits would be noticeable. However if someone has some suggestions, I would be willing to go over the model again:


The model is available under the CC public domain license.

This is nothing special. There are a lot of coin models out there however I found none of an old coin which would into the time frame.
The render shows the top view of the coin but it has also a third dimension.



I made this model also available under CC public domain license.

Now to some interesting models, used to transport goods.



These are two different blends, but with the same base model. As I will do more ships there are some things I will consider for future reference: Rig the ship as explained in the BlenderArt magazine issue19.
If anyone knows how it can be done to use one model with sails up and lowered, respectively how to animate the lowering of the sails, would greatly be appreciated.
The models are animated, The first one has wind blowing into its sail so the sails do look more realistic. The seconds lets gravity work its way to let the cloth fall more naturally.
The first model is available under CC BY-SA from BlendSwap. The second from my repository under the same restriction.

Nice modeling so far. :slight_smile:

I suppose that in the end the most models will be of buildings, so here is the first one I created - the branch office. It’s intent is to store a limited amount of goods as well as accounting.
The walls in the model can be removed and you are left with the beams.


The model is licenced under CC BY-SA-NC due to textures from CGTextures.
The rendering has slow convergence which I attribute to two facts:

  • The windows are dark glass. In future model they are white glass with a black background. This reduces the complexity of ray-tracing on both sides of the glass.
  • The beams are textured with a large image texture. This however is only noticeable in close ups.

The next model is nothing concrete but components, that are used to make up the user interface. The intent is to make it apear as a facade of a building.
This is not the rendered image that you will get but the composed image from many of the components in the model. There are others:



The model is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC and the Corinthian column is curtsy of Marcin_HRN from BlendSwap.

Nothing much to tell …



The windows are actually slightly more outside than the actual wall, which means there are no openings in the wall where the windows would be.
The model is available under CC BY-SA-NC.

This is the same base model as the above, however with a balcony



The model is available under CC BY-SA-NC license.

The tavern reuses the barrels as props.



the model is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC

All models (at least the buildings and the ship) up until now were originally set up for Internal rendering. In most cases the change to cycles was easy. With this model it was not. With BI the round roof could easily be mapped to a cylinder. This is currently not an option in Cycles, so I had to unwrap the roof and manually layout the UV map so it would be a rectangle.


The model is available under CC BY-SA-NC due to image textures from CGTextures.

some nice work there, i can imagine that sort of stuff in oblivion :slight_smile:

This scene marks the end of the first milestone of the project. It contains many of the models created up until this point.
Putting the scene together posed showed some problems:

  • The ship can only be seen from one side (you want to see the beams and sails)
  • The scene must be animated, for the sailing cloth to settle down
  • While each of the buildings is put together as a group their appending/linking is easy, somehow this does not work with the ship.

The rendering is done with the internal variants of the shown Cycles models. This will be updated and I will show the result here, when it’s done.


The second part focuses on a market place scene. So there you might find some buildings that have a bit more individuality than the ones seen so far.
The first model I did for this was a city hall after a reference from Lübeck:



This building is pretty eccentric and I do not know how well it works together with the other buildings in the same scene, therefor I did model a second town hall, which we will come to. So first here is the rendering of the model:


There are some things that you probably do not notice from this image, but still:
The two big arches are not of the same size. The left half is wider than the right. This was due to an error early in the modeling I noticed quite late and did not want to redo the whole stuff. Though in the final use it will not be noticeable and I have seen buildings that do have some such asymmetry.
I’m also not quite content with the weathered copper material. This is especially noticeable on the roof tops. I just had the patience to figure out a way to do this properly with Cycles.
The emblems/ornaments are a model of my own which is available on BlendSwap(at least the base of the model). They are licensed under CC public domain. I did not append/link the models but used a rendering of the model.
The city hall itself is also available under CC BY-SA license from BlendSwap

The church was modeled after St Jodok in Landshut (Germany)



Though the end result is somewhat different:


First note that it has the same copper texture for the turret roof as the above model, so the same drawback. The rendering in Cycles is somewhat slow due to the massive amount of greenish crown glass which I modeled for the windows. Since the surface is not even this results in complex computation for ray casting. It might have been more efficient to model the surface even and use displacement. Has anyone an idea if that would make any difference?
In the process of finishing this game project I will have to make different models of churches as well as different levels on extension. But that is some time into the future, for now this will have to do to complete the market scene.
The model is available under CC BY-SA-NC License.

Surrounding the market place are building, that we see mostly the facade of. Further more the seen will focus buildings such as the church, town hall and others, so the rest is not in the main focus but is never the less needed to complete the model (e.g. reflection in windows).
Therefore I created 8 models of building facades. These models do not have materials attached to them (for the most part), as I want to use them as a library, meaning using the same model with different textures applied.
The model is available at BlendSwap under CC public domain license.
Here are two set ups where I applied some texture:





You can notice some noise (especially in the fist picture) on the floor which stems from the window glass. I guess this can be avoided by applying a material to the floor ore by reducing the reflectivity of the glass.
I would be happy to see, what you can make with the facade library.

This model is a bit more elaborate as the basic houses from the first part. The main difference is, that the windows actually fill an opening in the wall. The windows were made using a script which is included in the blend file. The roof ridge could use some work.



The file is available under CC BY-SA-NC license.

So much for not being an artist, hah! Another possible option for transporting goods is a crate.

I thought of The Crate. However what is the use in investing my time to create something someone has already done better than I could. Once there was a great Crate model up on BlendSwap by Quandtum. Unfortunately this was remove since then.
Furthermore I image creates are somewhat more modern than the 14th century. But I was thinking of creating a jute bag, which would also fit nicely into the whole market scene.