I have been making progress on the medieval city wall that will surround the fictional town of Bad Oberdinkelheim, which will help to keep player-learners in a controlled space while simultaneously granting them an unfettered sense of agency. While creating the wall I have stumbled across another type of workflow. Whereas before I created the entire model in Blender before applying texture and bump maps, this time around I complete one portion of the model and apply the texture map before moving on the the next portion of the model:

What this is allowed me to do, is to develop one small section of the larger model (the roof and railing in the screen shot above, for example), and then create a linked duplicate (Alt-D in Blender) that can be used to complete the remainder of the model. This means that I only have to apply the texture and bump maps to one object and, as the duplicates are linked, have them automatically applied to all derivative objects. In the screen shot above, for example, the roof and railing object is copied several times to complete the rampart of the medieval wall:

The texture maps (the majority of which I got from Arroway Textures and maxTextures) are seamless, although some visible tiling still occurs (e.g., the stones in the rampart floor). I’ll have to see what I can do to sort of break that up a bit and make it appear more natural. Next step: Applying the bump maps and making some renders and video animations.