I want to make a new custom settlement, however i have never done anything like it before, best Beginner-Friendly place to start?

Hello there! I would very much like to do a new version of Imladris, much closer to the original depiction of Tolkien rather than the Movie's version(As it has been since 3.2)

While i would love to do it, i'm no artist and my experience with tools like Photoshop(I've been using GIMP for a while now), Milkshape and ITWE are (by order) very limited and most tutorials i've found are prior 2013 or just too complex for a complete newbie like me!

Any recommendations regarding this topic? I've read this 2 tutorials Leo's and Kong's

Of course i'm not doing this for public release and if i ever get anything done i will contact the right Persons to get permission, as of now is just another guy playing around with the files for personal reasons!

Thanks for any information!!

Cheers! :)

EDIT: I have actually done some Concept Art, Layout and Visual Design... I just need to translate everything into the Technical Digital World!

look here http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...al-Discussion)

Start off with a village level settlement, they are a lot simpler to work on and you can do more. Any settlement with walls has some limitations that are better dealt with later on when you are familiar with all the other stuff. I made some simple cave and ruin settlements, if you look at what I did you will save yourself a lot of hassle in terms of coding stuff in/collisions/etc.. If you don't do certain things certain ways you can get serious issues like major lag that has nothing to do with models or textures.

Edit; Also, make a simple layout with placeholder models to see if the BAI can even handle what you want to do before spending time making it look good. It is easier to fix bugs on simple settlements. The Moria settlement that doesn't have a gate (because it is village level) is also a good example to learn from I would think, I never actually checked it out in ITWE though so there may be some thing I wouldn't agree with.

DCI is making new settlements currently, collaborating with them would be a good idea, they can teach you a lot while you work on common goals. I am sure they want a more lore-accurate Imladris as well. As for me, I would have to have a better idea of what you are doing before I would help out. If I like what you are doing I can offer a good amount of assistance and look things over for you in ITWE. Using ITWE is the easiest and least time consuming part of making a settlement, so if I like what you are doing I can do all the ITWE stuff for you:P.