Wonderful progress. But I have some reservations about the glass and the sky, especially the sky. They are too far away from the real thing in my opinion. I don’t have a solution, though …
Cheers Minibus, Don’t worry though, The sky is purely a place holder, it will change. And the glass… i’m working on it. check out the windows on the right building. Too simple still?
This image is to:
test the tree - does a solid tree work? My thoughts are that it breaks up the vegetation
Test the vines - quite happy with this, i’ll have to neaten it up though
Test textures for new building.
I’m thinking that the library (the one with the dome) is now a bit too plain, but i don’t want to walk into the trap where i keep adding details and it looses the feel I’m going for.
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Beautiful, love the style. How are you creating the textures? Are you hand painting them in Blender?
Hey swmo, thanks
I wish i had the patience/talent to hand paint textures, but no. these are mostly images used to separate two colours using a ramp. plus a tiny bit of bump.
Bit more done today.
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I’m liking the color styles your going with Monk
Ah, clever idea. Another question then - how have you done the slight randomness of the tiles? They look like separate objects.
Cheers Guys.
I’m going to post some stuff that hopefully will share my workflow a bit better.
First up, Textures.
This shows you how i’m doing these textures. Bear in mind that these textures are still rough, but it gives you an idea of what I’m doing.
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Next; how i’m doing the tiles.
This is nothing groundbreaking, but if you are learning you may pick something up, or just laugh as you know a better way of doing it 
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Little bit on the texture, this only shows how to get the random colour variation, not the texture itself.
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Last of all, i bit of context of the model, as I realise that i’ve only put up test renders so far.
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Oh. This is lovely! Keep up the great work!
Thanks for taking the time and putting together the overviews of the roof tiles and textures Monk.
OMG. Terry is dead? He was my favourite author. I have read all of his books. Such a shame. RIP.
Great work, BTW. Not liking the leaves on the trees/bushes, though, but the rest is great.
For some reason post posted twice.
Thanks for sharing your texture workflow, Monk. This has much of a hand painted feeling to it. Really great.
And I dig the new glass approach, btw. But I’m still not too fond of the trees. Such a solid thing simply doesn’t read well as “tree”. Maybe much darker and greener and much rounder could work - representing a tree that had a fresh cut from the gardeners. Just my two cents, of course.
IconW - thanks
Harley - No problem. I don’t know how useful/interesting they are, but i know when i was first starting i liked to see other peoples work flow. Plus it means that others can point out areas i could do better more easily.
BiggR - I know, i’ve been reading his book since i was a child. very sad that he is gone.
- Minoribus- i’ll go back and look at the trees as they do not seem to have many fans…
Here is how I made the next house:
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Next building done
Looking forward to the next bit: observatory tower. here is a pic of the paper craft model of the university that i’m basing my image on.
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Thanks for all the details - very interesting. Some clever ideas I hadn’t thought of.
Great, I love the gradient trick to make the lower edges dirty 
that went straight into my book of recipes.