Medieval Town Square MOD

[AntiZombie]

Hi, i built a modificated version of the Town Square set to make it look even better (In my opinion) :)
 

 

[Corydoras]

Well, in my opinion it looks messy as hell. But that's just me.

[Arjo]

I disagree re. Looking like a mess. It is a couple steps further into a “realistic” direction. It spontaneously feels “different” (rather than better or worse than the original set). Kudos to the brave who didn’t shy away from adapting the set to his own taste. I also saw mods where the cottage roof was replaced with “claw” pieces similar to other buildings/LkC and of the three it looked the neatest to me but this mod here is grittier looking and kind of makes sense.

[Ben S]

2 hours ago, Corydoras said:

Well, in my opinion it looks messy as hell. But that's just me.

For me too it's too messy. 

1 hour ago, Arjo said:

It spontaneously feels “different” (rather than better or worse than the original set). Kudos to the brave who didn’t shy away from adapting the set to his own taste. 

As you say, it's a matter of taste. It's always great to change things to your liking. 

[sporadic]

This village has seen some hard times, I think.

I like a lot of this in concept, but I think I end up in the more messy than I personally like camp as well. I like a lot of the ideas, though, just a tad overboard.  I tend to like a light touch on the 'realism' levels.  Applied sparingly the add a lot to a model, though.

For example, all the gaps in the Tudor style buildings don't make sense to me, since they are wood and waddle and daub.  I don't think they'd weather like that and even if they did, one of the nice features of this type of architecture is the ease of repair.  The rough work makes more sense for the stonework though.

I do like the roof updates more than the set's.  The basic plate version is pretty boring, imo.  So sprucing that up is nice.

 

[Aanchir]

Honestly the changes you made to the studded roofs don't make a whole lot of sense to me. You left the grille tiles and rock plates from the original set that are clearly meant to evoke a thatch roof, but then added criss-crossing rectangular tiles like the ones on the Old Fishing Store, which suggest it's been patched up using wooden boards. Conversely, the contrasting tiles on the door of the weaver's workshop seem to match the shape of the nearby tiles almost TOO neatly, as if two perfectly rectangular slices were cleanly cut out of the painted wooden door, and then replaced with unpainted boards of exactly the same size.

Also, I agree with @sporadic about the gaps in the wattle & daub walls not making much sense for buildings that are still in active use. If your aim is just to make the walls look aged/weathered, it'd make more sense if you added some mismatched colors to suggest parts of the wall that have been patched up, but haven't yet been painted over. And on the farmhouse, you have also seemingly sheared a structurally important Reddish Brown wall post in the front left corner in half, shifting the lower half to the right (against the door frame). I think this may have just been a careless mistake, though, since if you flip that 1x3x2 chunk of wall in the bottom left around, the timbers will line up vertically just as they should.
 

That's not to say all of your changes are bad. The additional colors and textures you added to the grey stone walls work pretty well, especially with the little bits of olive green you added to suggest patches of moss/lichen! The added leaves on the old tree don't look half bad, either! Even so, I think something to keep in mind in the future is to think about exactly what sort of materials different colors, textures, and patterns in the original set represent, and how those different materials might age differently.

For example, the awning in the back of the carpenter's workshop is presumably fabric-based, so it wouldn't be likely to grow patches of moss or lichen in real life — instead, it might tear, which you can represent either by leaving gaps or by patching it up with not-quite-matching fabrics (which I believe is what the Earth Blue tiles on this awning are meant to represent in the original set). Alternatively, it might fade from repeated exposure to sunlight and rainwater, which you could potentially represent using lighter shades of blue.

Likewise, a thatch roof is more likely to be patched with fresh thatch (which might vary in color from the older thatch) than with a smoother and more solid material like wood or slate. And while moss loves to grow on roofs, keep in mind that the thicker it gets, the more it will vary in texture from the roofing material is underneath. Consider how the Medieval Blacksmith set uses studded wedge plates for some of its thicker patches of moss, contrasting with the smooth tiles used for the rest of its shingles.
 

On a final note, regardless of whether you agree with the criticisms voiced above, I think it's a little surprising that despite all the detail you added to the buildings themselves, the grass AROUND the buildings still looks as uniform in color and texture as it was in the original set.

I feel like this is an area where you could add further details, like adding taller grass or weeds to the ground in places that water drips down from the roofs (and/or places where the grass is harder to keep trimmed, like against the sides of buildings), and patches of bare soil in places that get a disproportionate amount of foot traffic, like outside the front door of the weaver's workshop and farmhouse (and/or places that don't get a lot of sunlight, like under the awning behind the carpenter's workshop).

Edited March 10 by Aanchir