| name | tuscan-buildings |
| description | Build game-ready Tuscan / Florentine townhouses in Three.js — walls, storeys, openings, quoins, hip roofs, interiors, and whole streets. Use whenever the task is an Italian palazzetto, casa a schiera, borgo, piazza, or any building that must look constructed rather than kitbashed. Captures the Casa Toscana campaign: elevations → meter-scale mesh → material splits → quoins → windows → rooms → night lamps → frost → a street of kin.
|
| metadata | {"short-description":"Tuscan townhouses: walls, storeys, openings, roofs, streets","user-invocable":true} |
Tuscan buildings
These houses are constructed, not decorated boxes. Every opening belongs to
a room, every shutter can close, every quoin stops at a window, every roof
tile is a coppo ~40 cm long. If it could not be built in Prato or a Florentine
contrada, do not ship it.
When to use
- Any Tuscan / Umbrian / Florentine house, palazzetto, or street
- Elevations-to-mesh (orthographic FRONT / LEFT / RIGHT / REAR)
- Game-ready merged BufferGeometry assets (meters = world units)
- Interiors seen through glass (interior-mapping, not a second scene)
Read references/construction.md for the hard rules,
references/street.md for placing more than one house, and
references/street-furniture.md for piano-terra doors, barred windows,
dado, and the Lucca/Prato photo language.
1. Massing (do this first)
| Storeys | Typical W × D | Eave | Notes |
|---|
| 2 + attic | 6–8 × 7–8 m | ~6.5–7.5 m | Casa bassa, often a shop on the street |
| 3 | 7–9 × 8–9 m | ~9.5–10.5 m | Most common terrace house |
| 4 | 10–12 × 9–10 m | ~13–14 m | Palazzetto / casa signorile |
- Street is +Z. Left = −X, right = +X, garden = −Z.
- Wall thickness 0.32–0.38 m. Never paper-thin.
- Floor-to-floor 3.2–3.5 m. Piano nobile (floor 1) can be taller.
- Ground floor sits on a stone plinth (~0.5 m). Small windows on piano
terra have high sills (~1.7 m) — privacy, not cellar slits.
Floor band array, 4-storey reference:
FLOOR_Y = [0, 3.48, 6.72, 9.98, 13.35] // last = eave
Do not invent a fifth storey to "look grand." Four is already a palazzetto.
2. Walls and materials
Street and piano nobile are stucco (warm ochre / cream / dusty rose).
Garden and service sides are often exposed brick. A side wall is
split: stucco toward +Z, brick toward −Z, meeting at a real edge
(no coplanar overlay — overlays z-fight and bury windows).
Back wall: brick on the service bay only (≈ 1/3 of the width), stucco on
the rest. Never slap a proud brick slab over window openings.
String courses (pietra serena) mark every floor. They wrap all four faces.
Quoins (bugnato) climb every corner:
- Alternate long / short (0.40 / 0.28 m)
- Each stone sits on its face, inset toward the middle of that face
- Side stones slide out so their ends are flush with the front/back faces
- Skip any quoin that intersects a window or shutter swing
- Bricks/quoins can never overlap a shutter — the shutter could not close
3. Openings
Kinds that actually exist on these houses:
| Kind | Where | Notes |
|---|
arch-door | Street centre, piano terra | Rusticated stone, walnut panels, fanlight |
plank-arch | Smaller casa | Green vertical boards in a rusticated arch |
herringbone | Carriage / grand street door | Chevron green boards |
carriage | Shop / garage | Wide green planks, no arch |
rect-door | Garden / side service | Kitchen yard or dining garden |
barred | Piano terra | High sill, dense rusted grid, stucco rebate |
small | Piano terra or attic | Same high sill on the ground |
rect-shutter | Floors 1–3 | Tuscan casement + green open shutters |
arch-balcony | Street centre, piano nobile / attic | French window, iron balcony |
rect-balcony | Garden or side | Same, rectangular |
louver | Bagno / stair | Closed shutters, no interior |
Rules we learned the hard way:
- Every balcony has a door or french window. No orphan railings.
- Side walls need a full stack on the street half (all storeys), not
just ground + one.
- Shutters sit proud of the brick (lz ≈ 0.20 m) on a plaster reveal.
Same green wood everywhere — never mix a second shutter material.
- Frames are walnut, 4-pane casement, stone surround + sill + optional lintel.
- Doors are wood. You do not see through them.
- Quoins and shutters must not occupy the same bay. Reserve the bay
(window + shutter swing) and skip stones that hit it.
4. Roof
Hip roof, terracotta coppi + tegole, tiles ~40 cm (uvPerMeter ≈ 0.36
on a 4–5-tile sheet). Colour is dusty brown-orange with lime bloom,
never cherry red — do not multiply the albedo by a red tint.
- Eave overhang 0.40–0.50 m, timber soffit
- No ridge beams sticking out (no
addOrientedCap hacks)
- Chimneys sit on the slope (
roofHeightAt), brick stack + stone cap +
two terracotta pots
- Downspouts at the corners, not mid-window
5. Rooms (the house is a plan, not wallpaper)
Adjacent windows that would be the same room share one interior.
One stairwell, back-centre, every floor — not a stair in every bay.
| Floor | Street | Garden L | Garden R | Centre back |
|---|
| 0 | parlours + androne | kitchen + service door | dining + garden door | stair / hall |
| 1 | salon (whole front) | dining | sitting + balcony | stair |
| 2 | master / study | bedroom | bedroom (louver = bagno) | stair |
| 3 | bedrooms + study | bedroom | bedroom | stair |
Night: crush photographic sunlight in the interior maps, leave a warm lamp
pool. Daylight interiors must not glow when the street is dark.
Frost is on the glass (roughness + opacity + milk), not a 2-pixel blur
behind a clear pane.
Shader interiors live on a portal plane just outside the glass. If the
shader fails to compile, every window goes black — never ship two main().
6. A street of kin
Do not clone the hero. Vary:
- Storey count (2 / 3 / 4)
- Bay count (2 or 3)
- Width (6.4–11 m) and depth (7–9.5 m)
- Stucco tint (ochre, cream, dusty rose, greige)
- Brick fraction on the garden side
- Shop door vs domestic androne
- Chimney count
Keep one construction language: same quoins, same green shutters, same
coppi, same plinth, same high piano-terra sills. Kin, not a theme park.
Place them with ~1.2–1.8 m alleys, street +Z, a cobble piazza, cypress
at the corners. Houses across the street rotate Y = π.
7. Performance / game-ready
- Merge by material (≤ 10 draw calls per house)
- Meter scale, origin at plan centre, feet on y = 0
GEOM_REV (or plan hash) in useMemo so HMR rebuilds- No reverse-Z (breaks sky). Use wall insets + polygonOffset
- Export GLB from the house root, not the whole piazza
Finish checklist
