Roman City Scene WIP

Voodoo

I figured I got enough done to start a thread. Started with just the roman aqueduct as architectural practice and I decided to put it in a scene. None of the buildings are final the I'm working on the layout for the market place in the "square".

qubism

mhmhm doesnt scream roman to me yet. got any reference u use to show?

Scott Ruggels

Roman had full rounded arches, The pointed arch was Gothic. But I would love to see this fleshed out.

Scott

Voodoo

Oh sheet thanks Scott. I had that on my fix list after attaching the individual pieces together but forgot about it when I started roughing the city in. Good thing you reminded me.

To get the Aqueduct I just hit up google pics, they seem to vary a bit in terms of hight, levels, thickness ect so I just found one that looked interesting to me.

For the buildings I googled Roman Housing. I pictured my scene as a busy city market place surrounding the aqueduct so I wanted mostly Roman era houses. Maybe I can incorporate some of the famous collums into some larger government buildings in the background that kind of dominate the skyline.

MoP

From what I remember, Romans didn't have houses with sloped roofs like that. They were mainly flat roofs, with a miniature wall running around them. Also remember when adding detail, Roman houses tended to have much smaller windows than we might be used to, and set higher up, since the main purpose of the house was to keep out the heat during summer, and large windows would have warmed up the house too much.
I don't like those "blocks" on the large arches of the aqueduct, for some reason they look wrong to me. I've been to Rome! :P
It's a good start though, just not Roman enough yet.

Joshua Stubbles

Well, looking at pics myself, I found that a lot of Roman buildings did in fact have roofing like that. Creative Assembly put a lot of effort and money into making sure that Rome: Total War was as accurate as possible. If you take a peek at some of the buildings in that game, it might give ya a hint.

I agree with MoP though, that the extruded bricks on the walls look a wee bit odd.

MoP

Yeah Vassago, you're right, sorry. I haven't looked at any pictures of Roman architecture for about 2 years when I was studying Classical Civilisations at college. I still think the slope on the roofs Voodoo has made is too extreme, they tended to be less angled slopes. I think a lot of inner-city urban Roman houses ("domae") did have flat roofs though, it was more the "better quality" housing near the outskirts of the city, and country villas which had the sloped roofs.
There were also "insulae", which were like 3-4 floor blocks of apartments, in the really cheap and dirty areas of Rome. They also had a tendency of collapsing and catching fire...

I think I feel these roofs are out of place because aqueducts were more commonly found in the densely populated areas for water supply, and the denser areas were usually the cheaper housing.

Voodoo

do you guys mean in the base of the arches or above the bases? The funny thing about the ref pic I used for the aqueducts is that on the bases they all had 2 stones that stuck out in the exact same place and those two funny width long stones that sat up in the arch.

Here is one of the few decent model cities of Ancient Rome. You can see the long buildings with the sloped roofs in the foreground tightly packed together. Unforunetly this is one of the only good ref pics I can find for city layout. Searching for Ancient Roman Housing is what inspired me to do the slopped roofs in the first place.

MoP

I was actually referring to the long stones in the arches. The bricks look a little weird too, but they should be fine once textured.
Yeah, in that reference pic, you will notice the houses in the foreground have sloped roofs, but if you look behind and to the right of the Coliseum, to the more densely packed housing (without any nice trees dotted around!) you will see that they mostly appear to have flat roofs.
I guess it just really depends what kind of "class" area you are recreating. For a reasonably wealthy area of Rome, the stuff you're doing is fine.

Voodoo

quick update. Roman Building variation number 1.
I'll have to tweak the scale a little when I import it I'm sure but the geometry is in.