Making a map for Red Orchestra 2: Part 2

What this is about.

Part one

Alright, so the basic layout for the map is finished. It still needs a little bit of tweaking, details like craters need to be added, and the entire trench and tunnel network for the hill needs to be created, but essentially it's good to go.



Thus, I decided it was a good idea to start working on some of the buildings for the town at the base of the hill. Now, I don't even pretend to be an expert on Russian architecture in the 1940s, but I have a fairly decent idea of what Russian houses and towns/villages of the time would look. Lots of small, wooden structures, maybe a farmhouse and a small garden for each. The majority of buildings will be single-story, and only have a few rooms, and will be fairly clustered together. Dirt paths are the order of the day, and electricity is a luxury upon which I have yet to decide.

The program I'll be using to model everything is called Blender. It's generally considered not the best, and bloody hell is it complicated when you first use it, but it's free and has decent functionality. So here's how it looks when you first open it up, and as with the UDK it's much easier to understand when you have a bit of experience with it:

Click for bigger versions.

Now, unfortunately I totally forgot to take any screenshots whilst making the basic shell of the house (spoiler: I don't write this as I actually make the stuff) so you'll have to take my word that it took a while and that there were some complications to say the least. But, eventually, with the help of the measurement guidelines available on the internet, I had the basic house that I was looking for:

 And a view of the interior:

Obviously I don't know if this will actually fit a person through but theoretically I see no reason why it shouldn't. A little detail which I like, and which seems to present on the majority of buildings in Arma 2 (set in a former USSR country) is a little porch attached to the front door. So I made one:

After this, the next step is obviously to create an interior for the house. This bit is actually probably the most complicated, as it requires a basic understanding of how a house is laid out, and the sizes of the rooms. Unfortunately I don't really have any of that knowledge. Still, I could assume that the kitchen would be near the back door (seen at the back of the above screenshot), so that was one room done. The others might not be so easy. I decided on a kind of sitting room area, and a single bedroom. I don't mind doing the furniture for a sitting room, as that's pretty easy, but I had a feeling that a bedroom may be a bit beyond me. Also, the bedroom size would probably not actually be large enough to fit a bed in. A problem indeed, until I realised I could just make the bedroom a room that couldn't be entered. Easy.

So that's the layout of the first house done. I'll probably end up making three or four different house models, as well as a farmhouse, and a barn or something. I'll probably end up standardising the doors and whatnot, and just applying them across all houses. Yes, I realise I haven't put any windows in yet, but that's super annoying to do, so I'm gonna leave it for another day.

Stay tuned next week for some more work which I have yet to decide upon.