Gatehouse architecture model

The Gatehouse is a set of massive architecture models I created for a Neverwinter Nights 2 module (think 'player-made adventure'), set in the Planescape universe. The Gatehouse is both a landmark of the Planescape setting and was to be a center piece, of sorts, for the module.

The Planescape source material offered little description or art for the Gatehouse, but I did gain a basic idea of the layout (four wings emerging from a central tower structure), purpose, and mood of the place. From there, I decided that I wanted to do something impressive with the scale, as I'm a big fan of World of Warcraft's environments and overall world design. I also found the cove-like layout of the central tower to be exciting, as I find it evocative to move from a vast, open space into a sort of enwrapping presence.

Above: shots from within the NWN2 game engine of the central Tower structure; Center: the horizontal bars on the gate would fade out as the player approached, to better accomodate the player's view. Please note that the ground texture and character model shown are NOT my work, but part of Neverwinter Nights 2.

Due to its size and complexity, the Gatehouse was split up into multiple seperate objects. The central structure is composed of three pieces, the cove-like tower, and the gate, broken into two pieces. This central structure is the most important part, the portion that players would experience up-close.

A challenge with the gate model itself was that it couldn't obstruct the player's view too badly, yet the player was going to be traveling under and around it. I took advantage of NWN2's geometry fade function, and set the horizontal bars to fade out as the player came near, which can be seen in the screenshots above.

The Gatehouse also has four wings, which were made of three seperate placeable objects. The two main wings on either side of the tower are simple mirrors of one another, with the lesser wings in back being copies of the same placeable object (I'm uncertain if these were to ever be seen up-close by the player).

Textures

The Gatehouse uses 20 custom textures, as well as one edited texture from the base game assets, the roof tiles. You can view some of them below. Click for larger resolutions and normal maps. The normal maps were created almost entirely in Photoshop.