The Castle town and interface pack is installed locally as 0.1.2. It follows the Necropolis workflow: separate background, building layers, building thumbnails and creature portraits, loaded through the existing resource paths. The images below show VCMI itself.

Castle town in VCMI with the HD background, buildings and creature portraits

Town layers

The background follows the original lake, hills and houses. Detail passes cover 35 static building variants, including base and upgraded dwellings, four halls, four mage guild levels and three fortification levels. Buildings remain separate layers, so the game retains construction conditions, upgrades, click regions and drawing order.

Native flags, water and lighthouse effects remain animated. This pass resamples those original frames; it does not generate new animation art. The flags consequently remain softer than the adjacent static masonry.

The first Portal of Glory composite exposed hard blue sky polygons around the building. The native sprite had included a patch of its original sky. A separate transparent gate and cloud layer removes that seam while retaining the gate’s composition.

Rejected early offline composite: blue sky fragments around the Portal of Glory clash with the new background

Building thumbnails

The 36 active building thumbnails are derived from the same HD town assets. Dwelling upgrades retain their town shapes and cliff or hillside context. Buildings clipped by the town’s left edge, such as the tavern, use separately centered framing. Construction and recruitment windows share these resources.

Construction window in VCMI

Recruitment window in VCMI

Creature portraits and backgrounds

Both portrait sizes for all 14 creatures are rendered from the existing Blender models. Initial framing exposed two mistakes: the Marksman used the wrong source scene, and long cavalry lances made the riders tiny. Correct scene selection and body-based camera bounds fix those crops. Small portraits retain transparency.

The first large portraits used a crop from the town background. After the user pointed out the mismatch with the original, I checked the Necropolis tools and restored Castle’s dedicated CRBKGCAS background instead. Its upper-left castle, hillside, conifers and empty grass foreground retain the native layout. Large portraits and creature display windows share this master; the shorter display variant crops ten logical pixels from the bottom.

Generated static restoration of the original Castle creature backdrop

The pack provides 2x, 3x and 4x interface assets, plus native-size backdrop variants. Logical portrait and building dimensions remain unchanged. Installation checks covered 426 town-layer frames across the three scales, and runtime logs confirmed HD resource loading. No VCMI engine changes were needed. Code lives in h3-art-pipeline; complete mods and artwork remain local.

The Swordsman’s wrist and gait corrections are recorded in the Castle roster article. Angel and Archangel sword effects are in the cavalry and angels article.