Medieval/Fantasy village/city "foundation" landscape

sausagemix_d9e00246a7

I find myself wanting to create more complicated settlements in terms of communities that arent modern cities but I feel as the store is lacking many very basic "foundation" landscapes for them. There are "scene" type products of high resolution villages, castles and fortresses, but Im thinking more in terms of blank slate environments in which you can say have areas for suggested things like markets, squares, governing areas, farming and residents that you could plug different types of architecture into for broad, far away imagery. My scenes get intensely cluttered with all the types of elements I have to combine just for the landscape itself and my manipultion of existing landscapes just comes out very artificial and all around flat.

Perhaps these landscapes can come in 3 or 4 morphable types of locations like mountainside, riverside, plains, outside a forest. Basic road path planes connecting differnet areas with changeable mats for dirt or stone.  Different addons could change the theme to fantasy catergories like human, elven, dwarven etc that can make them unique. Again this is not something as detailed at UltraScenery (or suggestions in general) just grounds and land areas that are designed for civilization that can easily be plugged in and out with other assets. 

Richard Haseltine

Have you considered Ultra Sceneery? You could set up distribution maps that would handle the rough layout, then use different ecosystems for plants and drop in the buildings.

chris-2599934

You can do a lot with plane primitives and dformers. Here's a scene from a village I made:

I made the ground with two planes, one a few centimetres above the other. The top one had a grass texture on it, the bottom one had the dirt texture on it. Then I applied a D Former to the top (grass) layer but set it to use a weight map instead of the usual sphere. I set the dformer to push the grass surface down by a few cm, so it dropped below the dirt, then cleared the weight map to a weight of 0 across the whole plane.

Now I could paint roads and clearings onto the floor wherever I wanted them, just by painting on the weight map. Wherever the weight map was anywhere near 100%, the grass was pushed below the dirt, wherever is wasn't, the grass stayed on top. Add in a few plants with actual geometry and you have a plausible base for a village, and one you can 100% tailor to your requirements.