The Zen of Creating Proper Buildings

(This tutorial was made with RM2K3, but is applicable to all versions since it deals more with spacial awareness than with the tool itself.)

Too many times I see really crappy buildings made with ALL versions of RPG Maker. Here we have this awesome tool for designing and creating great looking buildings, and no one puts it to any real good use!

Take a look at the screenshot below. Does it look like the towns you build?


Not Pictured: good buildings

If it does, than you're copy-pasting your chipset directly into your game from the side bar. Don't do that. It isn't designed in such a way that the developers wanted you to copy and paste, tile for tile, the building materials.
But even then, some people don't copy-paste and actually attempt to make good buildings but somehow fail along the way. Whether this is a lack of translating real world viewpoint into the isometric world of RM or whatever, it needs to change.

So, I'm here to show you how to create very basic, but attractive buildings that actually look like they don't defy the laws of space:

This took me a grand total of 2 minutes to make.


So, to start off, here are our building materials:

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This is the default Town chipset for RM2K3. For simplicity's sake, I'm using the white one. You can use the brick one, or even the log cabin one if you want as well.

Now, first of all, the darker coloured tiles at the bottom of each different building material are for creating realistic SHADOWS. For some reason, everyone wants to use them at the bottom of their walls (I know, it confuses me too). They can be used so that part of a building can cast a shadow on another part of the same building. There's only one rule with shadows: Be Consistent. Make sure shadows are being cast in the same direction on all buildings throughout the map. I will not be using shadows in this tutorial.



Hokay, start out by laying the walls of your building, as so:

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In this example, the wall on the right is 4x7, and the wall on the left is 4x8.

Next, add the roof for each wall:

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... uh-oh. They intersect! How do we fix that?

With these guys found on layer 2. They are your new best friends!

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So just extend the rightmost roof 'into' the tiles of the other roof like so:

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And we want to use this guy to fix it up:

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As such:

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See how well it blends in? That's because this is the whole purpose of this tile.


Next we want to fix the two ends of long part of the building so that the arched roof is actually visible. Remember your new best friends? Use them to get the job done:

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Ah... you see how it's all coming together now?

Using the roof and wall tiles, just fix it all up!

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And, that's it! Congratulations on finishing your first aesthetically pleasing building! Just spruce it up with a door, windows, shrubs and other misc stuff.


Now, obviously you can't have every building in your town looking the exact same, so it's up to you to play around with the tiles in order to do the same thing you just did, but in different directions, with different roofs, using different building materials:

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You can also go crazy and make some really unique looking buildings:

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Just play around with it and see what works, visually and spatially.

Nice. Thanks. Didn't realise what the diagonal type roofs were for until now. Amazing tutorial even though simple to most people probably.

Sadly, the first picture is what most buildings will kinda look like if you use the RMVX RTP, LOL

Wait, I'm sure I've seen them but I looked and I can't find them. I'm using VX. Any idea if they
A) Exist
B) If A is yes then what tab? ABC or D??

This is a good Tut. Sadly I started looking at Mapping Tut's AFTER I've figured all those nice little tiles. Nicely done. Haha, now I want to see how to do the inside of that Building!

Amazing tutorial even though simple to most people probably.

A surprising number of games made with RPGM don't have proper buildings. I think it's because a lot of people have a hard time converting what they see from the ground level into an isometric perspective. Obviously, no one can be blamed for that because how many of us spend our lives looking at our house from above?

It actually took me a while to get the hang of it. I had to look at a lot of RL photos of houses before I got the perspective right.

Wait, I'm sure I've seen them but I looked and I can't find them. I'm using VX. Any idea if they
A) Exist
B) If A is yes then what tab? ABC or D??

Couldn't say. I haven't worked with anything above RM2K3.

This is a good Tut. Sadly I started looking at Mapping Tut's AFTER I've figured all those nice little tiles. Nicely done. Haha, now I want to see how to do the inside of that Building!

Thanks!

Heh, don't expect anything from me any time soon. I made this tut because no one else had made a tutorial soley about buildings. I'm sure theres loads of good tuts on how to design the inside of buildings.

I should make a tutoril on toasting avatars (Look at my siggy lol)
Nah.


This is a nice tutorial though.

This is a simple and easy-to-understand tutorial that I found very helpful. I would have enjoyed if the tutorial had screen shots from RPG Maker XP, as it is my preferred engine, but, everyone has a preference and after all, this is your tutorial. You are right, so many people just copy and paste tilesets. (My first tileset was all copy and paste, haha, I had no idea how to do anything... ) Anyway, thank you for the generous contribution!