Raven's Roost Inn

I got an idea to create some Fantasy town scenes in Blender by using the templates and textures from one of the "print your own dungeon" tiles products.  I purchased a basic town pack of five buildings from Fat Dragon Games on RPG Now and went to work.

I figured I could use them to create images for a town in my Stillwater setting. Pirn to be specific.

The Raven's Roost Inn in Pirn

The first trial I used cubes and thinned them down to give the walls thickness but really that is not necessary and causes problems when folding. So after making one building, I dropped that idea.

The first attempt did look like its cardboard/paper origins

Then I went with plains in blender. Imported the pdf as an image. Cut the plain to the shapes on the template. Imported that same image as a texture and added it to the shapes. Matching it up was not hard. Then I “folded” the plains in blender just as you would do with paper or cardboard. I merged the pieces together so there was no cracks.

As an added touch I extruded areas that should be thick, like the roof of the building. Inset doors and windows, and extruded shutters. Finally, I changed the window textures to translucent and put some light in the buildings. I even put one character mesh inside the building in front of the window to limited success.

Using thinner surfaces to make folding easier

It works out pretty well. I still believe a more traditional approach to the buildings would likely look more realistic. But this was pretty quick. Once buildings are complete it is quite easy to copy them and add balconies or upper stories that are different to provide more variety.

A sneak thief I created to put on a rooftop