Medieval 3D 101: Building a Castle

Battle Buddies ATTENTION!

Lmbo… I sure don’t miss military formations.  Anywho… with all the war going on in our towns, the history geek in me has been reminiscing about wars I enjoyed learning about.  Wasn’t it General Patton who said, “No tapper ever won a war by leaving dead buildings in his country. They won it by making the other poor dumb tapper rebuild in his country.”  I’m pretty sure that’s word for word lol.

During events, there’s lots and lots of facts and info to put out and Alissa and Bunny are true masters at compiling and producing those posts.  In the back office, I help as much as I can while spending more time than I should decorating in my town and copying their answers to comments.  While this may seem like an admission of sloth (don’t worry, they know), it does occassionally bear fruit for me to share.  This post is one example so without further words, I bring you a 3D tutorial for building a castle thingy in your town.

So, you may have seen I blew up my town and have started making a medieval area.  While in the midst of all this, I decided my town needed more than 3 castles.  What about stone towers?  With my TSTO muse whispering softly in my ear, I set off to build.

First up, I knew the top would be square so I laid a piece of pavement for this. Using cobblestone walls, I then set to make a tower.  Here’s how I made the tippity top for it.

With this square set, I made the tower 11 walls tall, filled in the sides and made sure I made an entrance at the bottom.

Definitely a tower but I felt like it wasn’t enough.  Why not go big?  I was already home so that certainly wasn’t an option.  Continuing with the walls, I laid the basics for my additional structure.  This part was only 9 walls high so it didn’t compete with the tower.  The bottom is four walls, a two wall space gap and then three walls.

Next, the 3D aspects had to be fleshed out.  You can see I made the front into a rectangle (leave a one wall space between the tower and rectangle) and then proceeded with the back walls.  4 deep, 4 wide, in two and over two.  The images in steps 2 thru 6 show this clearer IMHO.

Here came the difficult part of making sure I didn’t jack up the tower.  The front wall closest to the tower (step 2&3)  is only 8 high.  I showed the exact placement for steps 4-6 because this is how I continued the 3D image.

With all the hard stuff done, I decided to use pavement to break up the top of the castle from the green surrounding it.  The second image shows the shape of the pavement in case it’s not clear under the cobblestone walls.

At the bottom of the front wall, I wanted to create another entrance.  These walls are 4 high.  Placing the hay cart inside creates the illusion that something is coming out of the castle.  Last step is to fill in the front and decorate to your hearts content.  I liked the iron fences up top as fortifications and as a gate for the tower.

My last little touch was to just take one chink out of the front of the castle for something special.

I figure it’s just not a home-made castle if the builders didn’t use the Olmec Head in the construction a la the town wall in “A Tale of Two Springfields” (S12:E2).

Makes me laugh.  Once you have your construction complete, the decorating options are all up to you.  In my B town, I found the catapult fits nicely on top of the castle.  Here’s what it looks like in my A town currently.

I love this as a refuge for Vampire Burns.  Just watch out for the white walkers. Well, hopefully this tutorial inspires a few of you to emulate or create your own stuff.  Apologies if it wasn’t too clear or resembled LEGO instructions too much. Keep on battling the man (whoever they are) and stay classy as usual.

TTFN… Wookiee out!

P.S.  While I’m showing off cool medieval-ish 3D… check out this one my neighbor SteveCTTW did.  SUPER RAD!