Introduction
First i'm newly registered here, i always liked this site, but never had anything to post.... and today's the day...
That said, i found [Award Winner] Fastest town in the west this week and i really enjoyed its simplicity and its results. While doing the tutorial it crossed my mind that it could be easily automated (and read later that someone else was also saying that in the tutorial's replies).
So i decided to automate it. I've altered the tutorial a little (trees and roads are only one layer with layer styles, so i replaced some destructive effects by non destructive one...). I also haven't automated the ponds mostly due to the fact that my result wasn't visually satisfying at all.
I decided to create a new thread so the stuff provided here does not get lost in the comments pages (page 3 atm i think). I flagged the thread "tutorial" but feel free to change that if you don't like it.
As a side note, english isn't my primary language so feel free to correct my spelling if needed.
Assets
Basically there is the following assets:
- 1 PSD (base for town generation)
- You can change the dimension to whatever you need (i've tested up to 10,000 x 10,000 @100dpi)
- You can change the grass texture (its only a pattern overlay effect)
- But make sure that only the initial layers remains (Background, grass and roads). It is really important for layer reordering, hiding, ...
- You'll be able to add as many layers as you want after the automated generation is completed.
- 2 brushes (houses and trees)
- 2 styles (trees and roads)
- 6 actions
- Pick Road brush (just select the right brush to draw roads: "Hard Round 19 pixels")
- [EDIT] You need the "Round Brushes With Size" brushes to be loaded for this to work (it comes with PS)
- Pick Default Town Color
- It chooses 2 colors for town generation
- I've made this one to allow ppl to use different colors than the default ones.
- The Town
- This generate the town...
- Just make sure the "roads" layer is selected before executing this action
- Pick Default Inner Town Colors
- This is the exact same actions as "Pick Default Town Color"
- It is there so you can select Action 2 to 6 and generate a town, an inner town and setup the trees layer in one click.
- The Town InnerPath
- It adds additional houses (adds a little bit of chaos in big squares... hey! we are talking medieval town, aren't we ?)
- Setup Tree Painting
- Select the tree brush, create the tree layer and apply the tree styles.
- From here you are ready to paint the trees
How does it work
- First you'll need to download the zip file containing the assets described above:
- My hosting
- Attachment: I've reduced the attached PSD image size by 10 times (its 200x100 instead of 2000x1000) due to file size limitation. Just make sure to resize your town map to at least 1000x1000 or it will be very small).
- Install the assets (only need to do this once)
- Drag & Drop the 3 files (Quick Town Brushes.abr, Quick Town Styles.asl, and QuickTown Actions.atn) into a running instance of Photoshop; this should do the trick.
- Open the PSD (and save it as whatever name you'd like your town to be)
- You can resize the canvas
- If you are doing so, just fill back the Background and the grass layers with any color
- You can also change the grass pattern overlay texture (but you can always do that later as well)
- Delete the content of the "roads" layer (ctrl+A then delete)
- Execute the "Pick Road Brush" action (or choose whatever brush you wanta paint your roads with)
- Draw your roads
- Execute the "Pick Default Town Colors" action or choose 2 colors of your own (most of the stuff can be changed later anyway)
- Execute "The Town" action
- And there you go, you have a town!
- If you want more buildings filling the center (and outer) gaps, execute the "Pick Default Inner Town Colors" and "The Town InnerPath" actions (here again, you can choose any color that you'd like instead of the default ones)
- If you want trees, execute the "Setup Tree Painting" action
- Paint your trees...
- Enjoy your newly created insta town map
Important note, once you have painted your roads, you can just select all the actions that you wanta execute and hit the "play" button.
This way it becomes a 3 points tutorial:
- Paint roads
- Executes all actions that you want.
- (optional) paint trees
Images (examples)
BaseQuickTown.psd
1.png
Step 1 to 8 completed
2.png
Step 9 completed
3.png
Step 10 to 12 completed (i painted a lots of trees)
4.png
Some "real" random generated towns (v1)
Town-v1.png
Some "real" random generated towns (v2)
Town-v2.png
Some "real" random generated towns (v3)
Town-v3.png
Some "real" random generated towns (v4)
Town-v4.jpg
Some "real" random generated towns (v5)
Town-v5.png
Some "real" random generated towns (v6)
Town-v6.png
* Version 5 and 6 have "walls", the visual effects aren't completed, just so you know what the grey things are