Filling the empty SUNTAIL central plaza with 77 props

I like the village overall, but the plaza was way too empty. Before this, the plaza (a rounded square with an 8.5 m half-width, with four roads running through the middle) had just 1 well, 4 streetlights, 4 small bushes and 14 small flowers. The SUNTAIL pack doesn't have a fountain either, so I had to fill it with the props it does have.

The goal was to give each zone a different feel while keeping the roads, the NPCs and the opening tour camera's path clear.

What I built

I split the plaza into four zones, each with its own character.

• Northeast: a red-striped market stall, fruit and vegetable crates, barrels, pumpkins
• Southwest: a small blue-striped stall facing the village entrance, stacked crates and sacks
• Northwest: a shade tree and a round flower bed. This is the only zone with a tree instead of a streetlight
• Southeast: a rest area with tables and chairs, with cups, plates, apples and bottles on the tables

Around the central well I added flower beds with stone borders in the four diagonal directions, and placed potted bushes and flowers at 7 spots on both sides of the road entrances.

The cross-shaped road (4.8 m) through the middle stays clear, and props keep about 1.7 m or more away from the 4 plaza NPCs (Sera, Erin, Mia, Luka). Entrance planters within 2.2 m of an NPC get skipped. There are 77 props in total, all marked as non-walkable.

I made a menu that rebuilds just the plaza (about 1 s, including the NavMesh rebake) and applied it to the current scene. On the first run, I checked beforehand that the only things being deleted were the 23 existing plaza props.

The opening tour camera passes through 6 waypoints inside the plaza at an eye height of 2.4–2.9 m. I played the first layout all the way through while logging the camera position, and two spots were a problem. The tour camera brushed the edge of the northwest tree's leaves, so I moved the tree a bit and shrank it from 0.55× to 0.45×, keeping it at least 1.3 m from the waypoints. In the shot in front of the shop, the stall awning covered the area right in front of the camera, so I pushed the stall 0.7 m toward the northeast edge and moved the streetlight there to the north road entrance.

Paths connect from the south entrance to all 8 NPCs, the tavern, blacksmith and guild doors, and the north, east and west roads, and the tour camera path doesn't run into any of the new props. No console errors in Play mode either.

Things I thought about

• A different character for each zone. To avoid repeating the same things in neat rows.
• Leaving a bit of the awning. It still hangs in the front left of the frame in the shop shot, but the shot looks at the shop past the market stall, so I left it.
• The plaza doesn't use the global random numbers. When I split the plaza code out, I made it stop using the global random numbers, so rebuilding the plaza doesn't change any other part of the layout.

Rabbit hole: the plaza rebuild menu crashed on its first run

The menu threw an exception the very first time I ran it. Luckily it stopped before saving, so the scene was untouched. The terrain reference only gets filled in when generating the whole village, so it was empty when rebuilding just the plaza. I changed the rebuild function to find the terrain on its own.

Next up

• If the shop tour shot bugs me, reposition the waypoints or the stall
• The plaza floor is a single stone road texture, so it might look monotonous. Circular paving and festival bunting aren't in the pack, so I'd have to make them myself