Tiny Glade – Interesting Uses for Fences

Explaining Interesting Uses for Fences

By DoggoDestroyerofFeels.

Fences are really fun to play around with but it can be hard to figure out what you want to use them for. So, here’s a collection of photos to help get you inspired/showcase some cool detail work you can do with the fence tool.

Photo #1

I feel like Fence #1 in this sequence doesn’t need much explaining since its just the default fence in between two default walls.

However, Fence #2 does: The default tall fence appears rickety and often gets covered in vines. If thats not the look you want you can cut the fence into sections to give it a more uniform and clean look. The tall fence has a bunch of really pretty applications in detail work. For example, in the background I have a tall fence pushed against a crumbling wall to provide the illusion that its being braced by the wood.

Big fan of the “fence next to ruined wall” look incase it wasn’t already obvious. Fence #3 is a tall fence cut into small sections so they appear as singular posts, this gives the fence a sort of tall picket fence look.

Photo #2

This is a custom vertical wood fence I put together. All the “parts” are colored differently to make it easier to see how it’s being built. The individual brown posts are fence arches with effectively 0 length, which may get a little tedious to do depending on the length of the fence you want. It’s also important to note that to build a fence like this it has to be built on paths, it won’t work otherwise.

Photo #3

This is a second custom fence made to look like the kind of fence you’d find on a farm. This one is much simpler to build than the last custom fence as it is just two fence arches stretched out and stacked on top of each other.

Something Important to note is that when using fences arches you’ll have to keep in mind that they don’t have a collision box so you will just clip right through them.

Photo #4-5

This is a proof of concept, a segment of a palisade wall with an accompanying tower. The actual “wall” part is a similar technique to the last two custom fences. It’s a about 10 individual fence arch segments made really narrow and pushed close together with snapping off. You may notice those smaller non-arch fences, those are to add collision to the wall and the sides of the tower.

Speaking of which, the tower segment is made using a floating foundation block with the wood detailing turned on. The “floor” of the foundation is made with a lot of small fence arches to hide the stone of the foundation. Lastly, if you’re unfamiliar with the technique the stairs are made using stone wall segments, resized in a descending pattern to look like stairs. I preferred to use the stone for stairs over fences because of the collision, I like to be able to walk up in the first person camera.

This kind of build can be VERY object intensive so I cannot recommend building a very big palisade wall with this method.

Photo #6-7

These photos are bundled together because this is one small build. The tall fences used under the house are colored for visual clarity. The fences fit surprisingly well under buildings to provide a sort of rickety stilted kind of look, I’m sure the stilt look would go great on a swamp or coastal house build.

The Stairs in the next picture once again: do NOT have collisions so if that bothers you I would recommend hiding stone stairs underneath them. You can make them as tidy or as unkempt and rickety as you want by stretching them or shrinking them. Additionally, with some fiddling around you can make certain steps bend and give them a “broken” look.

Photo #8-9

A build I would like to call “Emergency Bridge Repair”. To get a bridge this shape just stack a bunch of foundations with minimum size on top of each other and then position them as needed until both sides meet in the middle. In this case my foundations are slightly larger than minimum so I can add smaller foundations to give the bridge that broken look.

The “wooded boards” are just a fence arches clipping into the stone to make it look connected. Second photo attached to show how I’ve hidden the support beams generated by the fence arches.

Photo #10-11

You can clip fences into doors and windows to get a boarded up look. great for spooky ambience or for creating condemned or “quarantined” parts of your build. To board up roof windows or higher up windows You’ll need to utilize thin fence arches. The process can be a little finicky as you need to put paths carefully inside buildings so you don’t create doors or archways in the stone.

My recommendation for abandoned house look is coloring the windows blue/whatever color best matches the night color of your theme. which is showcased in photo #11. It’s not perfect but it does somewhat help in selling the whole “lights off” look.

Photo #12

If you take a path up a steep cliff it can create steep stairs/climbing stones. You can clip a couple of short fences into the terrain by lowering the size to it’s minimum. If you color those fences with colors resembling the rock texture of the terrain you can achieve a small rock kind of look.

I find that white and black fences work best for the aesthetic. On the opposite side of the fence size spectrum: if you put tall fences on a cliffside you get what’s pictured on the right. If you get lucky with the vine generation it can look pretty nice.

Photo #13

Nearing the end of my current collection I bring you: fences as scaffolding. As the other builds in this collection have demonstrated fence arches can fill many roles. To give the appearance of building on progress I would recommend putting short stone walls in between the supports of the scaffolding.

To follow the curves of a circular structure you’re going to want to trace around with the fence tool slowly with snapping turned off. Then trace around the edge, under your fences, carefully with the path tool so you don’t disturb the stone of the walls/buildings you want to build scaffolding for.

Photo #14

The final photo of my little collection. Adding a foundation floor to your ruins lets you get away with adding small details . You can use darkly colored fence arches to provide the illusion of rotting support beams inside ruins.

What helps to sell the rotting look is placing a fence arch outside the ruin, and height matching the height of the arch with the foundation floor then dragging it into the ruin so just the top beam is exposed.

This gives the appearance of a collapsed support beam. Lastly, you can clip the tops of brick walls through the foundation to give the appearance of individual loose bricks. That’s all I’ve got to share for right now, I hope you leave this thread with at least some inspiration.