WIP: Kirkbride style Insane Asylum Foorplan for Mystery Game

[Falconius]

I've been doing my mapping in inkscape which imports directly into blender as curves. I convert the curves to meshes and select the resulting faces and extrude them.

I organized all of my inkscape layers so I'd have references for windows and doors as well as the overall floor and other things I'll be able to use for spatial reference in blender. I need to work a little more on the actual floorplan in inkscape before I really start digging into the model.

Cool, I tried to do that with a file from inkscape a long long time ago before I knew anything about Blender and I couldn't get it to work at that time. Also it came out as super tiny and I had to scale it up. (I think the reason is it took the inkscape dimensions in which I was working in mm's and put the objects in Blender at their native mm size). I'll have to give it another go now that I know a lot more about what I'm doing. It seems like a very useful workflow, looking forward to the rest of your results.

Have you had a close look at the meshes? Are all the verts connected properly? No face doubles?

[Robbie]

From what I saw the meshes were good and triangulated pretty well considering. I think a lot of that has to do with my retentiveness in creating the inkscape paths. The extrusion was clean too.

I am using in inkscape 1mm=1foot so I'll need to scale up for sure when I go to do final.

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[Robbie]

Currently having a hard time finding a good layout for the boiler room/engine room/fan house assembly...Mouse if you're up for some more hard research that'd be a good find. Doesn't even have to be kirkbride specific. Here's what I have so far.

[Mouse]

Ummmmm........

I think boiler rooms just had to be large to house whatever they had in them. I can't find any boiler plans, which would be engineering drawings, but...

Here's an old School boiler c.1930(?)
Same boiler, different angle

Here's a page about Paxman boilers, which were made all the way up to 1969. It might be useful for the dimensions and general appearance of boilers from whatever period you decide to set your map in.

Is this any use?

(It came from a search on this page.)

Other than that I think I'm out of my depth on this one!

[Robbie]

I'm getting a lot of help from this: https://books.google.com/books?id=_C...20room&f=false

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[Mouse]

Oh that looks a lot more helpful than the things I managed to find

[Ilanthar]

That's a big building! I really like the 3D view and I woulnd't have thought to use Inkscape to get results in Blender. In which format are you exporting your Inkscape layers?

[Robbie]

Ilanthar, because I have a BUNCH of layers and they're all now overlapping each other stacked...I usually just select the walls and such that I want to import into blender and open a new inkscape document. From there, I copy and paste the objects into the new document and center them as best I can. I then have to open the svg file in a text editor and remove the inkscape version tag (or else blender will mess up the origin) and then I have to do some scaling and selection/conversion trickery to get the curves all centered and scaled right. I use a scale reference object that I make a parent for all th eimported objects and then I set the dimensions of that parent object and it scales them all to match it. Then I apply the scale which resets it to 1. Long process, I should write it up better so it's repeatable, lol...I'm sure there's better ways to do it, but I'm just now learning blender and have a lot more to learn still.

Here's an update of the current model process. Now to scale.



What you see here is the whole ground story with some color and ambient occlusion. The ground story is extruded to a height of 12' and no windows have been cut yet, but that will happen soon. I actually have the wards separated into individual objects, so technically, I'm only going to model 1 ward, and then duplicate it, but I went ahead and imported and extruded the whole ground story plan here just for demo purposes.

From here on out, I'll focus most of my modeling efforts into ONE ward, and then I'll import each story of the admin building and then the projections of the wings and the extreme case wards at the end of the hall...also the boiler house, and then the cellar will need to be imported and extruded as a whole.

I doubt I'll do all of this in one blend file to be honest. Since it's going into a game engine, I'll want to keep it modular...although I noticed that blender has a scene structure and layer management...I may be able to keep it all in one...It really all boils down to managing origin points and being able to dynamically place things in the game engine when they're modeled.

Edit: i think I might finish this thread and start a new one in the level design sub forum, since that's what this WIP is about to become. I'll post final floor plan 2d drawings in here later.

[Mouse]

Just looking at those rooms, the way they are taller than they are wide (or appear to be). Not normal. I think just staying there would be enough to drive a person slightly crazy.

Don't forget to leave us a link to find your new thread!

[Robbie]

Yeah, the average patient room was 9'x11' with 12' ceilings. And I'm accurate there...It's a little wonky looking because of the lack of door frames and openings for windows though. Coming soon!

Also since Ilanthar asked, I've already typed up a step by step workflow from Inkscape to Blender to get where I am now. I can create a tutorial for this if anyone is interested.

Thanks for looking though!!!