Celtic Buildings
ScottA
Surveyor
I've been working on a set of Celtic building symbols so thought I'd post the first few here to see what anyone thought. These are mostly pretty basic ones. The intent is also to do partially-built buildings, burned out buildings/ruins, circular stone building foundations, as well as supporting Celtic symbols such as cairns, barrows, henges, Celtic idols, and a few fills to go along with it such as moors, heather fields, emerald green grass, etc.
So before I go any further I want to test the waters to gauge the interest.
So before I go any further I want to test the waters to gauge the interest.
Comments
I think if these are ancient Celts then there would be a simple hole in the roof at the centre where the poles that form the structure meet. Variations on this theme include a fractionally raised 'cap', where the smoke escapes from a circular vent around a very small top section of the circular tip of the roof.
A couple of fairly straightforward websites with handy images of modern reconstructed roundhouses, more or less randomly plucked from the top of a quick search online are here and here.
Looking good though Scott, if maybe a bit too neat and uniform. Will you be adding the characteristic drainage gully, also known as a drip-trench, for the ground surface around the roof edges?
I have an Excel file with every angle noted down with its equivalent red and blue quantities if you want me to email it to you?
I do think I am going to go and rework some of these and "rough them up" a bit. They look too perfect. Also trying to figure out a better way to do the large round building with the deck so that it is more apparent that that is a raised deck around it. I'm thinking of saving them as two separate symbols so they would produce two separate shadows. That would help.
Was going to add smoke to some of the buildings, but again, I think I'll save that as separate symbols so smoke can be added as needed, and in the direction wanted instead of being a part of the building symbol and stuck going in one direction...
You could add clumps of moss or threadbare sections to the roofs? People can add things like doves from the CSUAC collection.
Roof repair sections? Newer cleaner looking 'patches' of thatch to paste on the rooftops?
You could split that building, or you could do it the way the CD3 Bitmap A thatch buildings are done, and add a dark glow like a vague shadow effect, and let the human eye-brain interpretation do the rest of the hard work. Combining shadows on separate sheets never really works either. Where they overlap they go twice as dark as they should be.
I think there are already smoke symbols around. I've seen smoke symbols in one of ahawk's maps just recently, so they do exist. There's nothing stopping you making your own, though. In fact - the more variety the better
Back closer to topic. Thatch discoloration would be possible, especially on poorly-maintained structures, due to things like moss, lichen and algae (though the smoke would discourage things like this, and destructive activity by insects and birds, so the top might be relatively "cleaner" than other parts of the roof). Repairs, while possible, would likely be only to minor areas, because the nature of thatched roofs tends to mean it's better to replace the whole thing in one go than try to keep patching it up.
It would certainly be good to have more options for buildings other than medieval tiled forms; next up some Anglo-Saxon-style great halls, perhaps?
Building materials seem to have depended largely on what was available in the local area, and yes, I've seen images of roundhouses built entirely of sods - walls as well.
One website I visited claimed that a roundhouse was only ever intended to last for 30-40 years and then demolished. For some reason thatched roofing was usually burnt at this point, and the land ploughed back to farmland instead of being built on again. Maybe that had something to do with the average lifespan (35-40 years) and some superstition about spirits? Who knows. Any reusable poles and wooden supports were recycled into new buildings though, so they were at least partially practical about the whole thing
I think the sod roundhouses I saw in passing were usually built in places like the Russian Steppe (the Ukraine) where there simply wasn't enough of anything else to build lots of small settlements.
Fire was a very common end to a roundhouse (er... no surprise there with cinders floating up into the thatch I'd say!), and its from these burnt down roundhouses that most of the archaeological evidence has been gleaned. Maybe roofing with sods was just safer?
Sods are used as roofing even today in the far northern islands of Scotland, where people sometimes choose to follow the ancient (virtually stone age) practice of 'crofting'. Its a sort of self sufficiency farming system.
Scott, these look great so far! And I love the idea of another set of building designs!
A couple of small things stand out for me - and these are only suggestions, so you can take them or leave them.
The thatched roofs...they look a little too uniform... maybe add another color variation/striation to them? and not so neat around the edges?
Also, if you are using these for cc3+, remove the shadows so that people can use the global shadow direction more effectively. Also...maybe make a 'snow covered' option for the roofs? It gets cold up there! lol
just my 2 cents worth.
Hide and wood long houses in the US were used by Native Americans in the eastern woodlands, particularly the north east. Lower latitudes, the long houses had sides that could be rolled up to provide air flow.
Not sure how to represent some of that in an overhead view.
This page has a few photos and some description, for instance, though this one has rather more, and better photos, but also a lot of irritating adverts.
A Google Maps check for "Lindisfarne" will provide you with an overhead view of the boat sheds. Zoom-in on the south side of the main square mass of the island, looking for the harbour bay, midway between the labels for "Lindisfarne Priory" and "Lindisfarne Castle". You'll find the sheds along the the grassy strip just inland from the shore on the east-facing western side of the harbour bay. Can't miss 'em; they're the things that look like half an upturned boat - because that's what they are!
And welcome back, BTW. Sorry to hear about your computer mishap. I still work off my desktop, so I'm safe from such disasters... I have two cats of my own, so I know how they can inadvertently cause havoc! The one used to like to sleep on top of my computer tower and the other likes to stand on my desk in right front of my monitor... Sigh... But I love them, my little muses!
I'm putting the finishing touches on about a dozen Celtic thatch buildings, hand-drawn so they aren't so perfectly round. Next step is the color coding for shading, which is no big deal (just rather tedious on a round shape!). My issue right now is scale. I know there's been a lot of talk recently about scale, and I looked through older threads and read the Tome and I didn't find the answer to my question. And that is, what size and how do I scale the buildings? I'm using GIMP to edit them. My first attempt at scale produced teeny tiny nearly invisible symbols, as compared to houses from another CD3 catalog. I had to increase their size by about 10x to equal that of a CD3 house symbol at normal scale (1) on the map.
So what size and what input (pxs, etc) do I use in proper scaling so they are equivalent to existing CC3+ buildings?
As always, thanks so much...
You can use a different value though, just make sure to tell CC3+ this when you import the png's (the 'Highest resolution' value)