Overlapping Buildings – Advanced
By CheeZy monkey
created 9/26/03
Welcome to Part 2 of the Overlapping Buildings article. This article will elaborate on the more advanced eye candy you can create by overlapping buildings.
Overlapping things in AOM can yield an almost infinite quantity of results. You aren’t limited in where you can put an object, what direction it faces, what axis it’s yawing on. This can make for some pretty interesting things. To demonstrate this I’m going to construct a Norse Factory Building…thing 🙂
Start by laying down your buildings on the map. Don’t worry about the terrain they create, you can change that latter.
Now we are going to make a building higher than the other buildings. This is a very simple process, simply position your building, make a “spike” of elevation underneath it (use the square brush setting on it’s smallest size to make a spike) and adjust the building. See the picture for reference.
Finish placing your buildings and adjusting their height accordingly. Now we are going to add “Architecture” as I call it. Look at the above picture, and look at the highlighted region. We are going to put some “Architecture” there.
What I did was I slid a house into that area so now we have a sort of roof thing. Details like this help diversify your work so that it doesn’t just look like you plopped 2 hillforts, a forge, and a market together. Details like these also look very good in cinematics.
That’s the finished product. Inspect your building and make sure there are no gaps or irregularities in on your building.
Now add an environment and continue designing your scenario as you please. When you make buildings like these it’s most important to make them fit in with the environment, it’s a good idea to add rocks and pebbles and grass around your building, maybe even some trees.
Unfortunately, all the details of your work aren’t immediately visible, so people can’t see every thing you’ve done to your building, however they sure will appreciate the originality and creativity. If you’re going to use cinematics make sure you capture the best angles of your building, see the picture.
With some more time, work, and effort you can really create some spectacular cities and landscapes by overlapping buildings. Just check out these “Gates of Valhalla” created by me for ES’s screenshot contest (It won me a T-Shirt)
That’s it for the Overlapping Buildings article, I hope this has been an inspiration to you designers.