In the Stage One article, we introduced our Castlemania Series about mastering 3DVIA Shape and building an incredible castle at the same time. This time we’re going to cover some 3DVIA Shape basics you really need to know about, and one method of making the terrain that will help your castle become a safe place to live and easy to defend.

First, we need to cover some basic concepts you need to know about 3D modeling:

1 – The size of your model file matters! It’s better to know the limitations at the beginning instead of spending a lot of time making a model and realizing you can’t do what you want. The maximum 3DVIA Shape model size you can make is a hefty 25 MB, but most of your models will be much smaller than that.

It is a good idea when building a complex scene, like a castle, to keep checking the size of your model and any models that you want to insert into it. It’s a bit like a bowl of fruit. The bowl (the biggest model) takes up space itself and will only hold so many pieces of fruit (inserted models). An apple will probably be a smaller file than a bunch of grapes, which is much more complicated.

Figure out which model will be your most complicated and make it your “bowl”. The models which will be added will be the “fruit”. The “bowl” can’t be any bigger than 25 MB once you’ve added all of the “fruit”, and each piece of “fruit” can’t be bigger than 2 MB.

You can find the size of any model by clicking on the “Stats” tab on the model page over to the right of the model image.

We at 3DVIA encourage you to build complex scenes more easily by re-using models in the 3DVIA content library that allow it. Each model you select will show whether it can be inserted into your Shape model or not. Just click on the same “Stats” tab on the model page and look farther down in the list.

If it says that you cannot use the file in 3DVIA Shape:

…click on the “(?)” to find out why. This can be important with your own models too. You may just need to change your licensing or re-mix setting to fix it. The model does not need to be a 3DVIA Shape mode for you to be able to insert it. It may have been made in one of many other formats.

Once you have inserted a model (even a 3DVIA Shape model), you will only be able to change its size, its position and make copies of it. Making copies of already inserted models will keep your overall model size smaller than if you insert multiple copies of the same model. The examples below helps demonstrate this.

You can see the first image shows an inserted house all by itself. Then I added one inserted man and the file size went down slightly because of the 3DVIA processing routine. Then I added 50 more men, and the file size only went up by 1 KB!

Another big factor is that all 3DVIA Shape models are constructed from triangles. Even what appear to be curves are actually line segments connected into triangles. This means models that are made of all straight lines and flat surfaces will be smaller than files with lots of rounded surfaces and edges.

You can clearly see this in any model by selecting the  “Wireframe Mode”. You can also select the “Vertex Mode” or the default “Smooth Mode” by clicking on the button in the player that looks like a globe.

Bear this flat-vs-round factor in mind when you need to make your file just a little smaller to get under the file size limits. You may be able to simplify your model a little bit or make some of the rounded parts as separate models, which you can then insert.

When you look at a model this way it is easier to understand why we collectively refer to the lines and shapes we create as “geometry”. Everything we model is controlled by the rules of geometry.

If you need a refresher on how to insert/remix models watch this video: Remixing Models a Quick Tutorial.

2 – The scale of each part of the entire the model is also important. If you want it to look realistic, each part of the castle should be the right size when compared with other parts. Our castle is built using an average medieval man as the basic unit of size. A man needs to be able to fit through the doors, ride his horse though the gates and to fit on the walkways without falling off.

If you insert a model and the scale is wrong, you can select it and then use the white handles on the corners of the box to make it bigger or smaller, as illustrated below:

I made the man using real dimensions, so I know he is 5′ 8″ tall. That means that this inserted house needs to be bigger to fit the man.

Left click on the house and then on one of the white dots (handles), hold the left mouse button down and drag it to make the house bigger (or smaller if you want a doll house).

The house is the now right size. You can see the man will fit in the doorway. Exact scale is not as important as relative scale, so just getting close is fine.

Now you know how to scale your models so they look right together!

3 – Being able to select the object or a line in your model is vital for both making and erasing parts of your models.  Depending on how you choose to do it, you can select part of the model, the whole model or just a single line or point. As you’ll see in the videos and as you work, whenever you select something in 3DVIA Shape, it turns blue so you know what you’ve selected.

These are two excellent and quick (about 30 seconds each) videos that explain the basic concepts of selection in 3DVIA Shape:

How to Box Select – shows how you can “box select” part of a model or the whole model.

How to Select an Entire Component – shows another way to select a whole component in your model.

When you are building a model there will be probably be more occasions when you want to simply select a line or a sketch point and not large parts of the model or the whole thing. As you use the various drawing tools they will show your results in either white lines or white surfaces.

Once you have several white surfaces it is hard to see the white construction lines, like in the left hand image below. I like to add a simple gray color to my model as I make it so that I can see those construction lines more easily.

Selection is also important when you are trimming lines or erasing them completely. You can select single items with the left mouse button or you can hold down the “Ctrl” key and use the left mouse button to select multiple points, lines or surfaces at the same time.

Be very careful that you are selecting what you think you are. If you have drawn a rectangle and only want to erase one line, hover over the line until you see it is the only line selected before you click to erase it. When a line is selected it will be blue and dashed. The same is true for single points on a line. If you’re not sure – zoom in closer. The “Undo” button or “Ctrl z” will help you fix a mistake.

Now we can start working on our castle plan again!

4 – There are lots of ways to make terrain. I’ll show you one way this time and you can use that, or you can experiment and make up your own way! In later stages of the series, I’ll show you more ways to create the ups and downs and ins and outs that make your model look more realistic.

Open the basic model of the 700′ x 800′ x 80′ Land Block With One House in 3DVIA Shape. Insert the model Castle – Basic Plan (yellow arrows) to make sure you have room for your castle while you  lay out the cliff tops. The castle layout represents the general size and shape of the castle as planned by the master engineer, but without all of the details. It is about 1′ thick so it can be seen more easily.

With “Snap Behavior” off (so you can draw the lines you want more easily)…

…use simple straight lines (red arrows) to lay out your cliff top edges. After making sure “Snap Behavior” is back on (so the measurement is exact)…

…use the “Push n Pull” tool…

…select the surface with the left mouse button, hold it down and start pushing the surface down.

You can see it indicates a depth (30′) for the cut as you move the surface. In this case, we want to cut all the way to the bottom of the cliff (80′).

It should snap right to the bottom surface, then let go of the mouse button. Notice the color of the existing geometry is automatically applied to the new geometry as it is created. This could save a lot of time if we wanted to keep our cliffs green.

Now turn off “Snap Behavior” and draw the bottom edges of your cliffs (red arrows).

Use the “Erase” tool…

…and click on the land outside your cliff edges to delete it.

Then draw connecting lines from the bottom of the cliffs to the tops. To keep things simple, draw from the end of one line to the end of another line, but when you need to – like in the right hand circled example above – just pick a spot you like on the line and end it there instead.

Now you have a lot of four-sided polygons that would require curved surfaces to fill them in. This is where the triangles we talked about earlier come in handy…

…just draw lines that divide the four-sided polygons into triangles, and you’ll get nice flat surfaces instead! The direction you draw the line in will affect how the triangular surfaces are oriented, but in this case it doesn’t matter.

After you paint your new cliffs, you can do the cliffs on the other side the same way and have a nearly impregnable projection of land to build your castle on. Notice I’ve inserted another man in two places, in addition to the existing house and man, to help remind me of the overall scale of what we’re making.

With these changes and the inserted models, the size of this model file – 700′ x 800′ x 80′ Land Block With One House – has gone from 661 KB to 819 KB. That’s almost half of the maximum size allowable for an inserted model, so I better plan my next additions carefully. After the king, queen or lord approves the castle layout in the next stage of the series, I’ll probably delete the Castle – Basic Plan model to get back some model size. I’ll leave the master engineer’s house, since he’ll need to be close by throughout construction.

I made sure that I did a “Publish As” so the original model is still available for you to open and make changes. You can also open this new model – 700′ X 800′ X 80′ Land Block With Cliffs – and use it to help with your castle if you want to.

That’s it for this stage of construction. Next time we”ll talk more about how to draw the layout that you want for your castle. Thanks for following along and making your own land and castles too!

Have fun and be sure to upload your models so we can see your imagination being used!

Check out the new Castlemania Group!

It has all of the models that are part of the Castlemania 3DVIA Shape Tutorial Series in one easy-to-access place. You can join and add your own models to the group too!