I designed crenellation symbols
Royal Scribe
🖼️ 156 images Surveyor
In a recent thread, @Traveller mentioned that he is seeking to discover the best style of designing castles in order to map the many real castles of the U.K.
I have been on a similar quest, though my quest is so that I can design fantastical castles of folklore and fairy tales, like Camelot and Sleeping Beauty's Castle, or the castles in Errol Flynn movies. Castles with many levels of battlements, parapets, towers and turrets, gardens with hedge mazes, and imposing keeps.
One of the things that seems to come up regularly in these forums is crenellations. I was experimenting using Mike Schley's walls along the top edges of my fortresses, and that looked okay, but didn't allow for much flexibility since the symbols come in one length and the wall drawing tool doesn't show the embrasures and merlons.
Anyway, I designed some symbols. I have 5' x 5' square ones. I have trapezoidal ones that can be placed to have arrow slits. I have corner L-shaped pieces. And I have several different rounded ones for round towers, including a tapered one to create arrow slits.
They are all created using CC3+'s drawing tools, with fills from SS4 Dungeons of Schley. There are five different shades of every shape, using Mike Schley's Natural Stone 1 through Natural Stone 5. (This was designed in SS5 Cities of Schley, but I imported the Dungeons of Schley fills as well.) I think that approach allows them to be used in the Atlas. @Monsen, can you confirm?
(I used the Stone Paving Grey for the structures, but tried one tower with Stone Paving Brown to see how it would look. The intention was to try to create the look of
They are all designed for a five-foot wide crenellation -- basically, you'd draw a line or circle with a 5-foot width for the base of the crenellation and then place the merlons on top. I've tried it both placing them by hand and also using SYMBOLS ALONG, and both approaches work reasonably well.
I am not an artist, and I'm sure others here could do much better ones, but I think it gets the job done. I'm happy to share if anyone would like to use them.
Here is the FSC file and also an FCW example:
And here are some images so you can see how they look. (I put a Bevel effect on the merlons, which is showing some odd effects because the colors with the base are close, even though I used a darker shade of the Natural Stone for the base.)
Here's a close-up of the trapezoid merlons along the edge of a straight building.
And here's one using the trapezoidal merlons for the lower level and then the square ones for the higher level. It also shows the corner pieces.
Here are two different round towers. The one on the left has normal merlons, and the one on the right has tapered ones for arrow slits. (I need to fix the Wall Shadow effects -- the base of the tower should not be casting a shadow farther out than the crenellation on top of the tower!)
Here's a quick "proof of concept" of a multi-level castle with different crenellation styles, plus some domes from City Domes for turrets.
And one last tower using the brown paving fill. This one uses a wider merlon using the SYMBOLS ALONG tool, but I don't think it's quite lining up correctly.
Feedback welcome, and feel free to use the FSC if you like them.
and 1 other.
Comments
I think that approach allows them to be used in the Atlas. @Monsen, can you confirm?
Yes, as long as you don't touch the actual art files (png files) on disk, it will work just fine for the atlas. It is only a problem for the atlas if you bring your own art files, or modify the official ones (including moving/copying/renaming them).
But anything that is done in-map, like importing existing fills from valid products, or changing the settings for them in the fill dialog is fine. (With one caveat, if you import official fills using the import bitmap fill style tool, DO NOT check the "Create Other Resolutions" checkbox, as if the files didn't have multiple resolutions already (Like all the solid xx fills), it would basically be creating new files for you based on the original ones)