Ok. This is the amphorae done for now.

It turns out that a little more shading made them look a lot better. I'm happy with these as they are, but if anyone has any suggestions all are welcome. (The Greek urn has yet to be done)

I will do cork bungs and a dirty straw texture to go with them, then move on.

Not forgetting the broken ones, of course ;)

Maybe the bottles could do with a bit of highlight as well?

Thanks Wyvern :)

I really meant the right look being similar enough to DD3 that the styles wouldn't clash and could be used together. It's a fine line between getting it too close, and not close enough. I want to be able to show a certain amount of detail, but too much makes them look too different. For example, the existing amphora is pretty homogenously coloured and textured, so if I start adding too many stains and too much dirt (though I will try to add some at least) or go too authentically grey-pink or white instead of orange, they just won't look right with DD3 assets.

I looked into how they used to seal them because I was concerned about that as well. It seems that back in the beginning they tried straw and wool and such, but later they were cork bungs. They couldn't really use much else because most of what was transported in them was wine and olive oil, and wine in particular goes bad really fast if too much fresh air gets into it in transit.

The inside walls were often waxed, or glazed in later times, and if they weren't then the inside walls would be even darker than you might expect with all that wine and olive oil soaking into them.

These are all too pink by far, but retexturing is nothing compared to adding handles, and I only have one more to do. I picked the 5 most variable amphorae. Doing more than that would seem to be a bit excessive - especially since there will be 3 versions of each one. Whole and lying on its side, whole and standing slightly on a tilt as if stacked in a ship's hold, and of course broken. That's 15 symbols that are all amphora!

Regarding the use of the pointy end bit. It is said that they were pointed like that to make it easier to stand them in sand, and one source suggested that ships stood them upright in a bed of sand! That I find seriously doubtful, since adding a large enough volume of sand would be such a huge amount of ballast as to be likely to sink the ship without adding the cargo itself. However, if you look at the shape of them you can see that it wouldn't be too difficult to store them in wooden racking, possibly built around them during loading, and if you look even closer you can see that a double row end to end would interlock if they were lying flat or against the inside of the hull and all the same type.

This is a broken urn, not a broken amphora, and it still looks too clean.

I think I will have to do a bit of post processing to make them not so sharp, the right kind of colour, and dirtier to fit with the set. But otherwise there's no reason why I can't do several amphora - whole and broken.

I also haven't figured out how to incorporate handles, since they are separate objects to the rest of the urn.

With part 1 published I've started on part 2.

While there will me more themed stuff to go with the style name, I've taken the opportunity to add a few things to the Containers and Treasure folder that could double as offerings. The bottom line of symbols are DD3 for colour and style comparison.