3DAlienWorlds BLOG

Designing the samurai ruined hut

It's time to announce the next design on the release schedule - a ruined hut for the samurai terrain range!

This is a design I've been looking forward to adding to the collection, ever since I designed the ruined stone walls last year. This time I'd be combining the layout and shapes from the farmhouses set, with some completely new techniques for detailing I've developed recently.

▲ Whenever I'm driving through the Japanese countryside it's quite common to see abandoned houses slowly collapsing in on themselves - so I make sure to take reference photos if I can! By 2030, a massive 33% of all houses in Japan are likely to be vacant or abandoned!!

Here's the front of a small house in a quiet rural village, that had some great textures and shapes. The collapsing roof is something I really want to duplicate in this design!

▲ Here's a great close-up of the wall construction, with dried mud strengthened with woven bamboo strips, covered in more fibre-blended mud. When a house wall is exposed to the rain and storms for several years, the walls are usually the first things to fall apart.

▲ Once the walls start to let rainwater inside, the supporting wood frames tend to rot quickly because of Japan's summer humidity, and then finally the beams supporting the roof start to collapse inwards.

▲ An excellent example of exterior walls slowly falling apart in an abandoned house, that I snapped when waiting at a red light!

Okay, so let's take a look at the final designs....



▲ The house is a small farmhouse, based on the layout of the existing farmhouse files, and the main part of it prints in 2 sections. The image above shows the smaller of these sections, which was once the genkan (entrance area) of the farmhouse.

You can see a fallen roofbeam, broken pieces of sliding doors, the built-in oven (too heavy to remove!), and scattered rooftiles and debris. The walls are fully textured with broken surfaces and underlying bamboo frames.

▲ This is the 2nd section, which shows the remains of the single tatami room. There's a central firepit, and plenty of broken woodwork and tiles.

▲ The rear of the house features this completely ruined balcony. It took quite a long time to first build the balcony frame, and then carefully scatter every piece of wood around where it might naturally fall.... and still ensure that everything will print support-free!

▲ The last piece of the ruined hut is this collapsed roof. I chose rooftiles rather than thatch, because a thatched roof would have vanished, leaving only a wooden framework - which wouldn't be very printer-friendly! So I foolishly chose to model this tiled roof instead, and every single tile was carefully placed and angled! That took quite a while....

This roof is designed to print without supports too, in 4 easy sections. The underside is also fully detailed, and you can choose to leave the roof off if you prefer, or remove it during play for easy access to the ruined interior.

The last pieces of the ruined hut are currently test-printing, and I should have some printed pics to show you later this week! Watch this space....

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