I’ve created this topic to gather information about good house building techniques for my game, Trick or Treat in Ro-Ville. I’ve been creating some assets for my game in hopes that I can release it by Halloween this year, but it’s not looking like its going to happen.
Right now, the main thing I’m struggling with is making good-looking houses. Everytime I try, they end up looking weird, and too modular. I don’t currently have an example, as I just deleted my 3rd attempt before thinking about writing this post, but if you really want to see, just ask me in the comments.
Back to the post topic; I’m seeking new techniques to make my houses that I build look better. What are some techniques to making semi-realistic houses? What are good materials to use for semi-realistic houses? What are good sizes? What do you do first when building a house? I have a lot of questions, and any response helps.
TL; DR: What are good house building techniques for semi-realistic houses?
Do not delete your previous attempts, keep them, and improve on them. If you kept your previous attempts, we could have given you feedback regarding those.
Anyway, I would look at references to get an idea of what to build.
As @COUNTYL1MITS stated, use images of houses for ideas.
Even if you don’t like a house in an image, take ideas from the way it’s constructed. How the building is built. How supporting structures work. How parts of it fit together.
Realize that every part of the images are there for a reason, either just for aesthetics, or as a part of the support structure, or little items like the amount a roof extends over the underlying wall so that it provides shelter from the rain in windy conditions.
Think of items like: When were these houses built? What is the oldest structure in this subdivision? Do I want all the houses to look similar or from different decades? Are all the houses perfectly centered on their lots or are some offset? Do all the yards have fences, and what kind of fence does each yard have? What style of windows and doors does this house have?
These are just a few things that I came up with, but they should get you thinking about how much or how little detail you want to put into the construction of houses.
Semi realistic builds normally feature variety of different materials including color pallets and house designs the material use looks similar to known house styles. The size really depends if your making small houses, i would consider having a blueprint or layout draw it in a software that way you could put parts or areas out on how big your wanting it and then figure out the length - width.
As a general recommendation when creating a house, i would always consider having a simple layout planned out and start with the base and foundation and build your way up. Gather a few reference images to use as inspiration and think about which areas or sections I want to start with. I’ll also sketch different house layouts on a piece of paper to help guide you on what size to choose, including the (shape and structure).
In my opinion there are different standards when it comes to creating houses in a specific size. The material use can be quite a hard task I’ll just try experimenting with many materials and see which ones fit the overall design, consider viewing real life buildings to find the appropriate materials such as wood, concrete, fly ash concrete, this is mostly used for the foundation of the house.
Most of these questions can be likely research to get a better understanding on the size - material scheme, and where to start.
