Silmarillion Sigils: heget's Heraldry Sets, Part 1

[heget]

I guess I can call this a late Anniversary Gift.

Silmarillion Sigils: heget's Heraldry Sets
banners, rugs, thrones, signs, and other assorted sigils and flags

This probably qualifies for my ultimate form of fannish obsession and organization for my themed hood. I explained out these sigils and the Sims projects I was working on attached to them in the previous here, so I'm going to repeat myself a lot.


It should be well-known that I'm designing my Sims game to be a (halfway faithful) reproduction of The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien, because it's one of my favorite books (more so than the other parts of the legendarium, but that doesn't mean that I won't eventually get to the events of Lord of the Rings proper and have fun with it) and the long history and dramatic family trees and cultures give me a lot to develop and play with.
Now, as part of the necessary objects for the game, aside from the props the story demands like weapons and jewelry, I need the banners and heraldry for all the factions and nobles. Not just as wall hangings to complete throne rooms (though the previews are early mock-ups of two of them) but as signs to place in front of the palaces to know what family lives there or in shops to know who's collecting rent, as identifying symbols on the battlefield and during tourneys, and because once the heraldric colors and patterns for each faction are establish, all other object and clothing recolors for my Sims game also have their scheme.

And I had the author's designs for several characters, so I had to recreate them, and once I made a few I had to do the project properly.

a.k.a. I had to do them all.

As part of this I had a two step mission: First I had to make the heraldric designs I did have pictorial evidence for, and then make my own designs for those needing symbols but lacking official ones.
Second I had to make the recolors of objects themselves, focusing mostly on wall banners.

The first step involved making symmetrical images using careful application of circles, triangles, and the abuse of mirror, flip, and degree incremental rotation in Photoshop- frankly something on the level of fractual art cut-outs more than anything approaching drawing.
The second step involved making a new set of meshes.

Why did heget have to make fancy new meshes for her elves' heraldric needs? (and go though some crazy math for the designs themselves?)

Because of headaches Tolkien designed for his elves. No ordinary heraldry for the peoples of Middle-earth, oh no. (Except the dwarves. And Gondolin, and once you got to the kingdoms of men in the Third Age....) Because the personal heraldry of the Silmarillion is based on designs that fit inside of a square logenze. That is a square tilted 45 degrees to make a diamond.
Unless the person is female, then the design is a circle. And possible evidence says for some examples if the design is tilted again to make a square that would work as the house sigil as opposed to the individual. (Actually, just go to this site HERE. Most helpful, especially for me as I was starting out.)

The designs are perfectly symmetrical- unless they belong to men of the First Age, then the symmetry is only vertical. I'll elaborate in the section covering each sigil.

But the big thing is all designs -from this point forward called the SIGIL- are created as to work in a perfect diamond (or a circle inside a diamond). For those that have never tried, very awkward to fit a square logenze in a rectangle as most banner meshes for the Sims are.
I tried to work with regular meshes to fit my little diamonds into banner and tapestry meshes as close to square-shaped as I could find, but I was still loosing a lot of space in the corners. In the end I decided new meshes were the way to go.

As you can see in the above examples, not everything I recolored with the heraldry uses the sigil inside its diamond shape, but some do.



So let's talk about these designs and one of the mesh sets I've applied them to:


Elven Banners:

The elven banner set meshes are complete, thanks to some shadow help from Sunni and her reminder that if you go back and edit to GMDCs of meshes that you've already Compressorized, you need to re-Compressorize those things or they will crash your game or not show up in the catalog.

They are the only completely new meshes in this set:

• 2-Story Standing Banner (Master mesh)
• 1- Story Standing Banner
• 1-Story Wall Banner (1 tile, smallish)
• 1-Story Wall Banner (1 tile, but oversized to cover about 3 tiles)
• 2-Story Wall Banner
• The sigil on a free-standing wooden frame

The Elven Banner Set has two design elements. First is what I've labeled the sigil: that diamond logenze in which goes the heraldric device of each character. To recolor this, the image is a perfect square, tilted 135 degrees on its side. Second is the rest of the banner, the cloth part hanging from below the square to make it look like an actual flag. Well, gonfalone. What with the standard on a crossbar hanging vertically and the device limited to only the under part of the flag. To save myself some effort and in a bout of (I think) cleverness, instead of just making the fabric some matching color or not putting a lot of thought into this, I got creative. The banner designs for the elven recolors, unlike those of the Plumbbob-Keep or the Andavri set, are more than just simple blocks of color. They qualify as their own pattern, also sharing the name of the device, and match and coordinate with the often too elaborate sigil. They work on a long rectangular banner mesh, or the caparison of a knight's charger, or anywhere where the full elven design would be impractical.

However, since I know most people's medieval games use their own heraldry (for what am I doing if not making my own, writ large), or they tend to use the EA/Maxis heraldry if a pre-made set, I went ahead and for a few things did Andavri's Albion heraldry.

Andavri's set:

I made recolors for the elven banners, the rug you see in the preview pictures, the one wall plate I'll talk about more later, and some throne recolors. If you look at some of her posts (see sets like these) you can see the heraldry and the names attached, and I did all of the families that I had the emblems for (not every color scheme in Albion has a heraldry symbol, but among those symbols are the three made by Maxis for the Castle Set).


So if all you want are the new meshes:

Download the Elven Banners Meshes

The rest of the recolors, elven or otherwise, are at the end of the next posts.

But if you want to see and grab for yourself the Silmarillion-themed content, carry on. I will warn dial-up users, a LOT of pictures incoming.

Comments

[youngcardinalsyoungbloods]

They'll still look great in my game, even if they are fandom specific, haha. I look forward to the recolours ^^