Tutorials/Walls and buttresses

This is another WIP draft tutorial --Simons Mith[82.69.54.207] 21:46, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Parts of a wall
Note: These are first-pass definitions and require further fact-checking. I do not currently vouch for their accuracy!

Walls have parts?? Yes. In modern times most people know what these features are, but there is much less appreciation of what they were originally for. As modern houses have damp-proof courses and are made of very uniform, mass-produced materials, some of the old pragmatic reasons these features exist no longer apply. The main reason we still have them is becoming a matter of custom rather than actual need.


 * Baseboard, Skirting board – this is a broad, usually wooden board at about ankle height whose purpose is to cover the join between wall and floor. It covers the uneven edge of flooring next to the wall and helps protect the wall from kicks, abrasion, and furniture. It can also serve as a decorative molding.


 * Panelling, Wainscotting – the lower area of a wall between the skirting board (if present) and the chair rail, usually at about waist height. Wainscoting was usually a wooden covering, over the lower area of a wall up to about waist height. Panelling was developed in antiquity to make rooms in stone buildings more comfortable. [cn] The panels served to insulate the room from the cold stone.[reword]

They helped to insulate a room with cold stone conceal the water stains that tended to creep up old walls prior to the use of damp-proof courses.[cn]


 * Chair rail, Dado rail' – a thin rail at the top of the panelling, generally positioned at about chair height. It helped protect walls against scuffing or dents from the backs of chairs and other pieces of furniture.


 * Picture rail – a thin wooden rail at slightly above head height which provided a way to hang pictures on a plastered wall. You can't bang nails into old plaster itself because that is highly likely to break it. Hence a wooden picture rail was the only height at which you could hang paintings in a room with plastered walls. The picture rail often also gave the upper border for a room's wallpaper. Above the picture rail, wall and ceiling would usually be the same colour.


 * 'Molding, Coving – a decorative border between wall and ceiling. These were often made of plaster, and in large rooms with high ceilings coving could be very elaborate.

Would you have all of these different features on one wall? No. You would generally have dado + dado rail and otherwise plain or some or all of: skirting board, picture rail, coving. [reword][cn]

A plain wall of any material is boring. This is fine if you have detail in other parts of your construction, or if you want a modern or utilitarian feel, such as for a warehouse or a factory. Plain walls have the virtue that they won't distract from whatever else you have built, whereas a 'busy' wall might. However, if there are large areas in the building where can see nothing of interest but the wall, some simple decorative flourishes will help a lot.


 * Plain wall - avoid, unless other parts of your building are well-detailed
 * Two tone - Use one material for the top few blocks, another material for remainder. For reasons of balance the bottom section should usually be at least half the wall height, and the top portion should be at most equal in size and usually smaller.
 * Separator - Place a band of a different material at one height in an otherwise plain wall. You can place the band high, low, at head height, or roughly in the middle of the wall, and these choices will affect the appearance of the room to a surprising degree.
 * Flourish - Add a 'kink' in the borders between sections. One block up or down makes quite a big difference.
 * 3D texture - Using stairs, fences, fence gates, inset half-blocks or any other blocks you can think of can add a lot of texture to a bland wall.
 * Combinations - Starting to combine the above ideas adds even more flexibility, but don't try to do all of them on every wall, unless the rest of the building has been kept plain.

Floors
Slab floors

Some furniture designs require a floor raised by half a block. Such a floor is called a slab floor. Using slab floors significantly limits your choices of flooring materials, so as a general guide you should only put in a slab floor when you know you will need it. Until you are familiar with enough furniture designs, building a house with slab floors throughout may cause more problems than it solves.

Just as for walls, the temptation with floors is to leave them made out of just one material, often smooth stone, cobblestone, dirt of grass. For walls the basic method of adding variety is to use horizontal or vertical stripes of two or three different materials. For floors, the common options are a border round the perimeter of the room, and/or a patterned floor texture.

Borders often look better in irregular-shaped rooms than they do in square or rectangular rooms. For this reason it may be a good idea to arrange for your building to have at least one room with a more unusual shape. L-shaped or T-shaped rooms often appear, and more rarely you may get an octagonal polygonal room -

When building a floor

furnances crafting bench pistons, sitcky piston, note blocks, glass over something

Blemishes

A good way to make a building feel more real is to deliberately add a blemish or two. For example, if you use a floor made of pistons in your brewing room, you might use one sticky piston to represent an old stain. A stone brick room may have a corner with cracked stone or cobblestone in it. A greenhouse may have the odd missing pane of glass and a couple of patches of long grass growing inside. A neat row of glowstone lamps may have one glowstone block. Don't forget to place the occasioanl cobweb, remove a section of fence, or the occasional torch.

blemish - a problem has occured, but it has been fixed, albeit imperfectly

decay = problems are accumulating and not being fixed - suggests abandoned/unoccupied building

Replace a stair block with a slab, or a whole block with either - or with a hole.

fill well with gravel, dirst

sand everywhere in deserts, dirt, gravel, elsewhere

Growing vines, long grass, or ferns over or around buildings is another way to introduce a feeling of very slight neglect, as is placing the occasional dead bush in amongst the live saplings.

Simulate creeper, enderman or zombie damage, or fire

water./lava/break redstone

Make a hole that lets animals in, and then put in a few pigs or chickens

Put water where it shouldn't be, or remove it from where it should be.

Make a hole in the roof, put earthj under, grow plants in dirt. Pkant a spaling. Plant a tree.

Place mushrooms

plant long gtrass/flowers in wheat fields

Borders

A good rule of thumb for floor borders is 'Plain border, fancy floor; fancy border, plain floor.'

Lighting

torch villager wool block fence posts + lamp iron railing chandelier

walls/floors of light fence post combos steps+ lamps fire lava lava behind iron/glass braziers

Roads/Railways/Canals/

Building desings Rusti Cadtle Jungle Industrial Horror Green

Parks and gardens

Mazes Greenhouse Shed Formal garden Hidden garden Hedges flower beds water features Widely spaced trees orchaerds

tree fence (prot. against deer)