This is the second view of Riverford Keep, the home of the main characters (played by my friends) in my current AD&D campaign. This view is my third (and hopefully final) draft of the keep's rear wall and docks as seen from the river Tesh. Since part of the compound's outer wall is also the rear wall of the central keep, The keep's wall is extra thick compared to all the its other walls. The towers feature arrow slits every 22.5 degrees around their center, allowing archers and crossbowmen to easily blanket the ground and river below with missile fire.

The moat which surrounds the keep empties into the river on either side of the keep by means of floodgates, located at the rear walls, which regulate the water level of the moat. Security was a concern here, as well. Normally, all that would be required for the moat to empty would be a small archway cut into the outer wall. However, an enemy could then theoretically travel atop the wall to traverse the moat. To prevent this, the section of wall that would span the moat is deliberately missing, with a solid iron spiked fence in its place.

Along the river bank, you can see the docks area. Built into the docks is a freight tower used to carry goods up the 20-foot embankment to the rear doors of the keep. It is a 2-chain design, with one that connects to the winch, and another that goes to the counterweight located on the side of the lift tower. For added security against a river raid, the winch is operated from inside the keep.

Bryce & 3D rendering techniques:

Nearly all the architecture you see was done using primitives and boolean operations. I then mixed together a variety of textures and applied them to the surfaces as appropriate. I managed to fix the "artifacting" that Bryce does on the stonework pattern I am using, by rendering it at 1600x1200 resolution and reducing the image down to 800x600 using Paint Shop Pro.

For the ground and embankment, I used the terrain I had created for the first image of the keep. I then duplicated the terrain, removed the ditches from the duplicate, and reduced the duplicate's height by 15 feet to create the "riverbed" for the moat channels and waterfalls. I then added a flattened cube, spread it out to fit the moat channels, and gave it a water texture. For the river water, I had to create a terrain and edit it to create a "ripple" effect to the surface, because using a flat cube with a texture bumpmap produced unrealistic reflections in the water.

Hardest to do was the waterfalls. I used the contours of the "riverbed" terrain as my baseline, then used the terrain editor to "paint" ripples onto the base contour, added slope noise, and smoothed. I repeated this several times, having to "undo" on several attempts until I got a pattern that looked right. Next was texturing. After a few hours of trial and error, I figured out a way to make the Specular and Diffuse properties of the water texture change from clear and glossy on top to bright and "frosted" as the surface altitude decreased.