Whitestone Abbey

[jamestwitherspoon]

Today, I was looking for an excuse to learn Sketchup, and decided I'd try to make an isometric map of a location in the Kingmaker adventure path, which I'm currently running. I decided on Whitestone Abbey, a place my players will likely visit in a couple months.

After spending three hours or so learning the program, I feel like I'm mostly happy with the basement level. I'm sure I'm doing a lot of things the hard way, but here it is. It's fairly simple right now, and I'll look into adding objects and such later, after finishing the structure. Not sure how I'm going to do that yet. Likely Photoshop.

I'll be updating this thread in the future as I work on the project. Feel free to give suggestions, as I have no idea what I'm doing.

[jamestwitherspoon]

Just a quick update. Been working on this for the past couple days. I decided to take a different approach and completely model the building, with cutaway parts to reveal the interior. Finished the outside structure, aside from a few features. Still have to add interior objects as well, plus make some sort of exterior landscape. Let me know what you think. Suggestions always welcome!

[Tonnichiwa]

Wow!, I think you are doing a fantastic job with this. The perspective is great, the colors are great, and it is a very nice design. I really cannot say anything needs to be changed. Fantastic job with this.

[kacey]

This is great. I've been seeing allot of nice work done in sketchup lately, and this is another excellent example of why I might have to check it out for myself. I'm wondering... Did you do all the texture work right in sketchup, or was this done in PhotoShop or some other program?

[jamestwitherspoon]

Thanks for the compliments guys. Makes me feel good, as this is the first time I've ever tried anything like this.

kacey, so far, I've done all the textures in Sketchup. The images I've posted are exported directly from the program. There's not as many options as Photoshop (it's just painting an image onto the surface of the object), so I'll probably end up doing some touchup work in Photoshop after the building is complete.

[jamestwitherspoon]

At this point I feel like I've finished the first and the second floors of the building. Still working on the third floor and basement, but thought I'd share.

I've spent most of the time I've been working on it the last couple days making the 3d objects that are in the building.

[jamestwitherspoon]

Pretty big update today. Finished all the buildings on the map, plus the cemetery and the well. Had a lot of issues with adding the terrain, as the 2d map I was working from made no sense when translating to 3d. As written, the basement would stick out of the side of the hill, so I had to make adjustments.

I'm also not happy with the texturing at all. Not really liking the way it looks, but also it's killing my computer every time I try to work with the textures and it's making the filesizes too big. I'll have to find some way around it. Still learning the program and discovering new things about it every day.

Any tips / suggestions appreciated, thanks!

[Ilanthar]

Very nice work on those, James!

[kalmarjan]

Looking like a beautiful rendering. What version of SU are you using? I dabbled in it back in the day, but haven't for a while. Have you considered Blender for maps?


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[deleter]

Wow, this is impressive. Roughly how much time went into this? I'm going to be running a d&d campaign centered around heists and something like this could go really far in helping my players plan out + execute creative strategies.