Very attractive holding art, is that your work or are those base game or HIP assets I've never noticed?
Yes it's all my work, the holding art is the primary and only feature of this mod, and my primary inspiration was the historical architecture of different areas of Europe (and in future maybe other places) in the XI and XII centuries, keeping a touch of the vanilla style for all of 'em.
In the screens you can't see all the things I changed, I've added respectively new art for:
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Byzantines, and it's the less realistic one, due to the fact that byzantine city housing for most of the middle ages was in wood and mostly indistinguishable from the later ottoman style, but I've took some inspiration from the classical greek mediterranean towns with white-painted houses (still widely diffused today, also in the hellenic influenced areas of Italy), with some "romaness" for maybe a "revival" of the empire (the byzantinophile lobby is powerful and I fear them).
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Italians, the one I personally like the most, because my inspiration come directly from a lot of medieval italian towns I visited, with the classical post-roman style of insulae mixed with a lot of houses close to each other due to the lack of space because they had to build only inside the roman walls, and
towers and domes. (in the future maybe I'll add a different style for southern Italy)
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Caucasians, with the classical armenian/georgian style of churches with the pointed roof, I took some inspiration from paintings, pictures of archeological sites in Georgia and Armenia and from what I was able to learn about the architecture of those peoples at the gates of Europe.
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Occitan, I tried to use the more "occitan" style I found, because the architecture in Provence for example was way too similar to the italian one, some inspiration come obviously from the romanic of Occitania for the churces, from the town of Carcassonne and for the housing I used a typical half-timbered mediterranean style, the opus craticum of the romans who was still widely used.
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Iberians, for that I used a modified version of the occitan church (that I've also made) due to the strong influences of the occitan and lombard romanic architectural style in Hispania, for the castle I tried to represent a visigothic horseshoe arch but It's difficult to notice it, while the housing is a mix of the italian and the occitan ones.
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Slavic, now used for all the slavs apart for the russians, that's because the russian architecture of the time was mostly in wood in a style very similar to the norse one, only the temples/churches were different but maybe I'll change that later. By the way my inspiration come from hungarian and polish medieval architecture, from the church of St.Andrew in Krakow and the typical housing of that region, who was very similar to the northern european one but I tried to display a lower population concentration, so not so many houses.
Maybe one day a good thing can be to differentiate the south slavs from the western ones.
I was also thinking to create a different style for the celtic peoples of britain, but then I discovered that the architecture of the place was modeled on the English one, and too similar to that, and the english is too similar to the vanilla classic style for north-west-europeans, imho at least, if someone have some advice I'll be happy to change my mind.
If someone more learned on arabic or maghrebi architecture can give me some advice, maybe will be a good idea to differenciate a little bit the middle-eastern style, but for what I know the housing of that region was more or less symilar and well advanced by the time of Babylonia.
For every style I used a modified old painting of a landscape of that region, took from the internet.
And that's all.