"Mouse Tower" - a nice pavilion on a bank of river Elbe overlooking the city of Magdeburg.

It's now spoiled by a firm that acquired it and turned into a tasteless restaurant with an ugly annex building. But it used to be a very nice and quiet place. And I wanted to capture that impression!

And so I painted it... in Crocotile3D.

It was the first large-scale model that I made with Croc. To me, it looks like a house of a wizard. A modest house of a modest wizard, with a small tower looking at the river.

Crocotile3D is what it sounds like: a 3d-editor where models are built of textured tiles.

With this model I've practiced hand-painted texturing, object creation and lights positioning.

I especially like the misalignment effect of the objects: here, the boat, the fireplace and the street lamp. Being grouped as objects, these tiles can be re-scaled and positioned incommensurate to the grid of the rest of the tiled scene. It creates a stand-out eye-catching effect.

The top-down view of an orthographic projection of the scene is a ready-to-use ttRPG map. The lights and different elevation combined create the sense of volume similar to one in XCom (although XCom was in isometric view... that is a few screenshots before). Also, combination of textured terrain and "objects" reminds me of Myth/Soulblighter games, and it warms my heart!

Creating one such map is tedious though, and should be done for memorable, even if fictional, places.

Unfortunately, the online 3d viewer that I'm using does not render the model lighting. And in only the ambient light the model looks very dim.

I might address this issue in the future. You can still spin it in the meanwhile: