Suggestion: Modular small town US Main Street stores
lou_harper
Posts: 1,163
As I was grappling with turning New York stores into small town-ish, It occurred to me how nice it would be to have a build it yourself street.
The bottom floor would be simple, a rectangular box open on the front end. At the back a door to the alley and double wall to allow for interior and exterior texturing. To the open front would go the shopfront–multiple designs but all the same size. Then you could stack these stores next to each other, attach your choice of storefronts.
Above the stores would be two floors, windows at the front, brick wall at the back, maybe a couple of windows. You could stack these on top of the stores. As long as they were all uniform size, you could mix and match. There should be a variety of texture options.
Would also need corner buildings and sidewalk/road.
Interiors, street props, etc. could be optional add-ons.
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Comments
+ 1
+1 for me too.
I think it would be a nice idae to develop a set of street sections which include those for curves, straight sections, all with sidewalks and even driveways. Plus, I think there should also be sections for lawns adjacent to the sidewalk. With these sections we should be able to build our own streets.
There are (rather retro) small town shops in this product: https://www.daz3d.com/mountain-valley , but they're done as four or five big blocks, rather than individual shops that you could slot together in a modular fashion.
It's not too difficult to make your own shopfronts out of primitives, supplemented with a few other bits and pieces from bought products. The same is true of roads, so long as they're straight (I'm actually in the middle of making a set of built-from-primitives roads for a project I'm working on). But I agree, it'd be great to have a product in the store like that.
Err. I may recognise that Mountain Valley town centre as being from 'Back to the Future', or is my memory playing up?
I'm part way through creating a wall with a pair of glass swing doors as a deliberately boring looking club entry way. Most UK night clubs are boring to look at in order not to let on to any local officials that young people have fun in the building. If any such inkling gets out, it'll be closed down. The model could be moderately easily converted into a glass fronted single or two storey shop. My biggest problem in getting it to look completely right is a lack of familiarity with small town America. I've done a couple of basic renders which I can upload this evening which show what it's like.
I took a random drop with Google Street View to somewhere I neverknew existed, Haxtun, Colorado:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6409924,-102.6285711,3a,75y,9.94h,88.3t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1smi_97iSeZpB12kTxRorJuA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
Is this the sort of small town wanted? Not many 2 storey places there.
Regards,
Richard
Looks like it, this is just missing the burning tire marks
Doing more random Google Street views, it seems 'Tiny Town USA' has almost all single storey buildings, while 'Small-ish town USA' has more brick & more 2 storey buildings.
The further west you get, the lower the average building height for the same size town and the less usage of brick.
The smaller the town & the further west or south, the bigger the spaces between buildings.
So.. Which part of the USA is this modular town to be from?
Regards,
Richard
As promised, a view of a little thing I'm working on that could be modified relatively easily to create a modular shop front:
Regards,
Richard
Yeah, no thanks. Fiddly, time consuming with dissatisfying results.
Mountain Valley was nice when it came out in 2016. It's showing its age, not really what I'm looking for, and too recognizably Back to the Future.
What I have in mind is a less candified version of Main Street in Disneyland–cozy, pastel, kinda Norma Rockwell. Like these:
Or this:
They are a combination of one and two story, and both is fine.
Looks reasonable. I'll see what I can contribute (if anything) , and hopefully others will create buildings too. With a mix of people doing the creation, we'll end up with the random mix of styles you get in real towns.
Regards,
Richard
Cheers!
Richard, my early memories are mostly from southern California and then we moved to 10 miles outside Portland OR and back to northern California. In earthquake country brick is dangerous. When I was first stationed in D.C. and saw all the brick buildings and later in England, I was weirded out. I still don't put heavy things on walls, especially over beds. Lived through too many big ones.
If a natural disaster hasn't wiped out a portion of a town, it could be a mixture of 19th C Wild West wooden or brick buildings (MidWest), stucco, Sears Catalog homes, Victorian painted ladies, Spanish Colonial, and dreadful post-WWII 'modern' block design and 60's drive-throughs. That is of course if the town council didn't put their foot down and refuse to destroy their town's ambience and stop that 'improvement'. And now they are surrounded by suburbs where you have to drive to get anything. And abandonded shopping/strip malls.