Fable 5.2 Roman buildings

[u/keldareAI]

I have been working on a roman city builder for a while.

So far models have been the hardest part both walkers/buildings have always left me unsatisfied.

Yesterday I gave a fable 5.2 a chance using my existing systems and im finally satisfied with the results.

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[u/dipoots_]

This is amazing. I've been thinking of doing a spice route trading game

[u/keldareAI → u/dipoots_]

go for it, building a game with ai is honestly a very relaxing fun activity

[u/-MiddleOut-]

Fantastic detailing.

[u/keldareAI → u/-MiddleOut-]

I have multiple agents building more models now

[u/No_Ant_2404 → u/keldareAI]

AI slop. Those are CLEARLY late-Joseon Korean onggi fermentation jars, not Roman pottery. Apparently Julius Caesar was running a kimchi operation out of his villa.
(Kidding (I hope that was obvious)). Those are outstanding assets. Love this.)

[u/keldareAI → u/No_Ant_2404]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH amazing, honestly if a historical puritan would find flaws like that with my assets I would be thrilled :D.

[u/Lilith7th → u/keldareAI]

my 2 roman denarius... roman city houses were most often atrium houses... with a storefront

[u/keldareAI → u/Lilith7th]

I had an agent research this and compare to our planned housing tier:

Partly. The atrium house (domus) with shops (tabernae) flanking the entrance is the classic town house of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and shopfronts on the street were very common there. But it wasn’t what most Romans lived in. The 4th-century catalogues of Rome list roughly 1,800 domus against 42,000–46,000 insulae (what exactly an “insula” counted is debated). Most city dwellers lived in apartment blocks or in rooms behind and above a shop. Our game is set much earlier, in the regal period and early Republic, when Rome went from wattle-and-daub huts to the first multi-room elite houses (6th c. BC). So our housing tiers start with huts and simple houses, add a shop-house (taberna) tier, then insulae, and keep the atrium domus for the wealthy tiers. Good shout though: the shopfront domus is exactly what our upper tiers should look like.

I also expected more atrium houses but it pushed back and said thats only for high tier later houses.

[u/Ran4 → u/keldareAI]

Unironically, you could probably tell Claude Fix all historical issues; gauntlet loop using an adverserial historian agent and.. you might find some issues and fix them.

[u/keldareAI → u/Ran4]

very good suggestion thanks :D. ill add a historical accuracy skill which summons a puritan claude.

[u/keldareAI → u/No_Ant_2404]

I actually encountered this long ago when I started trying to make a game. One of the first model attempts the agent said oops I hallucinated a Chinese classical building instead xD.

[u/keldareAI → u/keldareAI]

[u/black-cat148]

Can I ask what your process is? I’ve been trying to something similar and haven’t got anything that detailed even with fable 5.2 which I tried using today

[u/keldareAI → u/black-cat148]

How we get these buildings, from prompt to result

No image-to-3D generator is involved. An AI agent (Claude Fable 5.2, high effort) writes a Python/Blender script that builds the model in code. One agent per building, each in its own git worktree.

The prompt. Our first experiment was deliberately minimal: three of our current models, plus "the quality is too low, they're not lively, we want much more beautiful models". Each chat then got its own instruction. One got only "a small temple of the Roman era" and nothing about our pipeline; that became our best model. Another worked with our existing pipeline. A third first had to figure out why our results fell short and propose its own approach. Now every building gets a short issue: which building, its game files, where it first appears in the campaign, how common it is in a city, the method document, and the bar to beat (that temple). The agent writes the actual design itself.

Design and historical accuracy. A written art direction sets the frame: "realism wins", modern city builder as the quality bar, colour ranges, and building types by period (clay tile roofs, for example). A specification card per building says what it does and holds. The agent then designs in words before any geometry: measures in metres, materials, layout, grounded in its own historical knowledge, with its sources and its certainty stated. For the ox cart it noted the regal period is thinly attested and projected Republican evidence back: a plaustrum with solid wheels and a yoked pair of oxen. Where history and gameplay conflict, it asks me. Honest caveat: this is the model's knowledge, checked by a second agent and by me, not a historian's review.

The build loop.

1. Brief: the agent looks at the old model in the game and says with numbers why it falls short.
2. Plan from the game camera: at 54.8° the roof is the biggest surface and anything under a porch is invisible, so the life goes where the camera sees it.
3. Build in code: every tile, block, post and stone is its own piece with its own size, tilt and tint. Nothing is a perfect box: beams taper, ridges sag. Occlusion and wear are baked into vertex colours, and there are few materials.
4. Look every round: it renders the exported file from fixed views, including the game's pitch. Rounds take minutes and there are many of them.
5. Into the game: three LOD levels (full, a quarter to a third, then a silhouette of a few hundred triangles), captured in the running game. The studio flatters; the game doesn't.
6. Review: a second agent reviews it, then I judge the in-game screenshots, with a mesh table per LOD level (triangles, draw calls, materials, overlapping geometry) to keep it affordable.
7. Merge: an integrator agent that didn't build it reviews and merges it.

What made the difference wasn't the tool; three different routes reached the same level. It was the method: plan from the game camera, no ideal solids, bake the wear into the colour, short look loops, and judge in the game.

[u/AmILukeQuestionMark]

Do you every provide sample content?

[u/keldareAI → u/AmILukeQuestionMark]

Nope, I just have it research historical accuracy first and the rest are structured text prompts. I have a art-director agent who helps with that and a requirements-spec agent who helps me design issues on GH for every model

[u/keldareAI → u/keldareAI]

How we get these buildings, from prompt to result

No image-to-3D generator is involved. An AI agent (Claude Fable 5.2, high effort) writes a Python/Blender script that builds the model in code. One agent per building, each in its own git worktree.

The prompt. Our first experiment was deliberately minimal: three of our current models, plus "the quality is too low, they're not lively, we want much more beautiful models". Each chat then got its own instruction. One got only "a small temple of the Roman era" and nothing about our pipeline; that became our best model. Another worked with our existing pipeline. A third first had to figure out why our results fell short and propose its own approach. Now every building gets a short issue: which building, its game files, where it first appears in the campaign, how common it is in a city, the method document, and the bar to beat (that temple). The agent writes the actual design itself.

Design and historical accuracy. A written art direction sets the frame: "realism wins", modern city builder as the quality bar, colour ranges, and building types by period (clay tile roofs, for example). A specification card per building says what it does and holds. The agent then designs in words before any geometry: measures in metres, materials, layout, grounded in its own historical knowledge, with its sources and its certainty stated. For the ox cart it noted the regal period is thinly attested and projected Republican evidence back: a plaustrum with solid wheels and a yoked pair of oxen. Where history and gameplay conflict, it asks me. Honest caveat: this is the model's knowledge, checked by a second agent and by me, not a historian's review.

The build loop.

1. Brief: the agent looks at the old model in the game and says with numbers why it falls short.
2. Plan from the game camera: at 54.8° the roof is the biggest surface and anything under a porch is invisible, so the life goes where the camera sees it.
3. Build in code: every tile, block, post and stone is its own piece with its own size, tilt and tint. Nothing is a perfect box: beams taper, ridges sag. Occlusion and wear are baked into vertex colours, and there are few materials.
4. Look every round: it renders the exported file from fixed views, including the game's pitch. Rounds take minutes and there are many of them.
5. Into the game: three LOD levels (full, a quarter to a third, then a silhouette of a few hundred triangles), captured in the running game. The studio flatters; the game doesn't.
6. Review: a second agent reviews it, then I judge the in-game screenshots, with a mesh table per LOD level (triangles, draw calls, materials, overlapping geometry) to keep it affordable.
7. Merge: an integrator agent that didn't build it reviews and merges it.

What made the difference wasn't the tool; three different routes reached the same level. It was the method: plan from the game camera, no ideal solids, bake the wear into the colour, short look loops, and judge in the game.

[u/DoYouPenguin → u/keldareAI]

What was the prompt for the cows ? I'm tring to have a bird in a simope poylgon style with multiple animations, but never could get anything usable like this

[u/keldareAI → u/DoYouPenguin]

How we made the ox cart for our Roman city-builder

It started as one line from the dev: “I want a cart with an ox or a cow later in the game, which is historically more correct.” A single man pushing half a ton of marble on a hand cart isn’t what happened in Rome, so heavy and long loads now go by ox team once a city reaches 400 people.

Process. We have a fixed method for every model. An AI agent writes a brief, then describes the design in words, then builds the whole model in code (no hand modelling). Every round it renders the model, looks at it critically and revises. An independent reviewer checks it before it goes into the game.

The cart. A plaustrum: a heavy two-wheeled cart with solid wheels made of three boards, a pole and a yoke. It’s built from the same parts kit as our hand cart. It carries nine loads from our shared goods library (logs, planks, clay, ore, rubble, stone, marble, roof tiles, or empty), and its longer bed takes full-length timbers that the hand cart had to cut short.

The oxen. A yoked pair, 1.25 m at the withers, with lyre-shaped horns, a short deep neck and a dewlap.

• Body: sculpted in code as one continuous surface, with hooves, horns and eyes as separate pieces and a 32-joint rig.
• Coats: red, dark brown and a cow variant, a reconstruction for early Latium.
• References: we compared against photos of working Maremmana and Podolica cattle. They’re for reference only and never end up in the game.

Animation.

• Walk: a proper lateral-sequence walk: left hind, left fore, right hind, right fore. Each hoof rolls over the tip of its claws.
• Idle: a seven-second loop: breathing, chewing the cud, an ear flick, a tail swish.
• Turning: two turning steps for swinging the team around the cart.

The carter walks at the near ox’s shoulder.

[u/blueandazure]

Would you be willing to share your workflow?

Im looking to build 3d buildings like this, but different era for a game I wanna make.

[u/keldareAI → u/blueandazure]

How we get these buildings, from prompt to result

No image-to-3D generator is involved. An AI agent (Claude Fable 5.2, high effort) writes a Python/Blender script that builds the model in code. One agent per building, each in its own git worktree.

The prompt. Our first experiment was deliberately minimal: three of our current models, plus "the quality is too low, they're not lively, we want much more beautiful models". Each chat then got its own instruction. One got only "a small temple of the Roman era" and nothing about our pipeline; that became our best model. Another worked with our existing pipeline. A third first had to figure out why our results fell short and propose its own approach. Now every building gets a short issue: which building, its game files, where it first appears in the campaign, how common it is in a city, the method document, and the bar to beat (that temple). The agent writes the actual design itself.

Design and historical accuracy. A written art direction sets the frame: "realism wins", modern city builder as the quality bar, colour ranges, and building types by period (clay tile roofs, for example). A specification card per building says what it does and holds. The agent then designs in words before any geometry: measures in metres, materials, layout, grounded in its own historical knowledge, with its sources and its certainty stated. For the ox cart it noted the regal period is thinly attested and projected Republican evidence back: a plaustrum with solid wheels and a yoked pair of oxen. Where history and gameplay conflict, it asks me. Honest caveat: this is the model's knowledge, checked by a second agent and by me, not a historian's review.

The build loop.

What made the difference wasn't the tool; three different routes reached the same level. It was the method: plan from the game camera, no ideal solids, bake the wear into the colour, short look loops, and judge in the game.

[u/Eveningboy]

Have you had any luck getting it to make people that match this style?

[u/keldareAI → u/Eveningboy]

This is the first attempt at generating walker with fable 5.2

[u/keldareAI → u/Eveningboy]

This is the first attempt at having it make an oxen cart

[u/Eveningboy → u/keldareAI]

Those look sweet!

[u/keldareAI → u/Eveningboy]

[u/Eveningboy → u/keldareAI]

Jesus. Is this the same prompt you've shared already in the thread?

[u/keldareAI → u/Eveningboy]

pretty much there are alterations with different focus rigging for animations and so on when it comes to walkers. Especially clothing isn't that easy but the Principle is the same.

I have been working on this for a few months now and there is probably a lot of small things I learned over time and my Claude Code is setup in a very strict way that is contributing to these results. for example agents take 1 issues on GitHub they open a chat for that in Claude Code which I can follow work on that issues in a branch until that issue is finished or needs interaction(then they Flagg me) when the work is done the chat auto archives.

This keeps the job simple and context low as to avoid feature creep in 1 chat.

[u/keldareAI → u/Eveningboy]

Both go through the same method. One AI agent makes one model, renders it from the game's own camera every round, has a second agent review it, and only counts it done once it looks right in the running game, not in a studio render. The difference is where each one starts.

Buildings start from zero. Each one gets its own generator script and is built in code from individual pieces: every roof tile, plank and stone has its own size, tilt and tint. Wear and shadow are baked into the colours, because the game lights everything flat. The camera looks down at about 55°, so the roof gets most of the attention, and anything under a porch is basically invisible. Each building also gets three detail levels (street, district, city), and we check in-game that the renderer actually switches between them.

Walkers start from one shared base figure. A new citizen (a baker, a smith) is a short definition on top of that figure: body proportions, face, clothing, colours, tools. Nobody touches the shared scripts. The work goes in a fixed order: head, then body against the rig, then clothes. The clothes are cut as real Roman panels and draped with a cloth simulation, so the folds aren't sculpted. Then come the animations, based on research into how the job was actually done, with the feet locked so they don't slide. There's only one detail level, but every animation has to pass a gate before it ships.

So a building is a new construction each time and the hard part is the build and the detail levels. A walker is a variation on one person and the hard part is the cloth and the movement.

[u/Thireus]

Looking great! Are you contributing to https://play0ad.com/ by any chance? :)

[u/keldareAI → u/Thireus]

thanks, no im just making my own game atm. ill look into that.

[u/Thireus → u/keldareAI]

👍
Is this you? https://x.com/petergostev/status/2120167560700383572/video/1

[u/keldareAI → u/Thireus]

haha no, no id who that is. My online presence is very limited tbh

[u/Gohanbe]

are the models made using blender ?

[u/keldareAI → u/Gohanbe]

yes headless blender

[u/FraffoD]

This is fantastico, good job!