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Thread: Fastest town in the west [Automated]

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  1. #1
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    Tutorial Fastest town in the west [Automated]

    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

    1. First you'll need to download the zip file containing the assets described above:
      1. My hosting
      2. 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).

    2. Install the assets (only need to do this once)
      1. 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.

    3. Open the PSD (and save it as whatever name you'd like your town to be)
      1. You can resize the canvas
      2. If you are doing so, just fill back the Background and the grass layers with any color
      3. You can also change the grass pattern overlay texture (but you can always do that later as well)

    4. Delete the content of the "roads" layer (ctrl+A then delete)
    5. Execute the "Pick Road Brush" action (or choose whatever brush you wanta paint your roads with)
    6. Draw your roads
    7. Execute the "Pick Default Town Colors" action or choose 2 colors of your own (most of the stuff can be changed later anyway)
    8. Execute "The Town" action
    9. And there you go, you have a town!
    10. 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)
    11. If you want trees, execute the "Setup Tree Painting" action
    12. Paint your trees...
    13. 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:
    1. Paint roads
    2. Executes all actions that you want.
    3. (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
    Attached Files Attached Files
    Last edited by Ogulrok; 05-16-2019 at 10:30 AM.

  2. #2

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    Could you add an action to automatically pick up my lower jaw from the table?

    This is really impressive! Only thing I don't really like are the trees, the style just doesn't really fit with the buildings, and the texture is very repetative (very visible when you create a forest). I think they need a bit more of an outline.

    For those not proficient in Photoshop, you need to select the brush, style and action sets first. Also, I got an error in step 4 (Pick road brush) stating that a 19 pix hard brush didn't exist. I did however know how to make that :-)


    Good job, keep it up!

  3. #3
    Guild Grand Master Azélor's Avatar
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    Very nice, I will have to try it someday. For more trees, you could use these brushes http://www.cartographersguild.com/ma...buildings.html

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    Quote Originally Posted by Fransie View Post
    Could you add an action to automatically pick up my lower jaw from the table?
    lol i guess that can't be automated

    Quote Originally Posted by Fransie View Post
    This is really impressive! Only thing I don't really like are the trees, the style just doesn't really fit with the buildings, and the texture is very repetative (very visible when you create a forest). I think they need a bit more of an outline.
    You are right, now that you mention it, a big outline as the one of the houses would be better... idk how to do that tho, i tried a few things and it isn't so great (inner shadows, outer, center and inner strokes, both combined)... The goal is to make it easy (as close as 1 click as possible) to generate an on-the-fly town...

    Quote Originally Posted by Fransie View Post
    Also, I got an error in step 4 (Pick road brush) stating that a 19 pix hard brush didn't exist. I did however know how to make that :-)
    humm.... thats one of the default PS brushes (in the "Round Brushes With Size" group). I tough that PS would have "known" by itself to load it... i'll update my initial post with that requirement then, thx for pointing this out.


    Quote Originally Posted by Fransie View Post
    Good job, keep it up!
    thank you very much

    Quote Originally Posted by Azelor View Post
    Very nice, I will have to try it someday. For more trees, you could use these brushes http://www.cartographersguild.com/ma...buildings.html
    Your trees are rly nice btw, i extracted 30ish of em for use in Map Tool. I just rly dont know how to use that in this town automation (with PS actions). But, I just found out that you can do real scripting in PS (Adobe Photoshop Scripting | Adobe Developer Connection) so i may take a look at generating content (like a forest) using external bitmap images... even maybe a town using your town buildings, but automated... i wish i had more than 24hrs per day...

  5. #5

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    Wow, this is really impressive! Super fast, easy customizable towns, I'm impressed! Are they easy to tweak? Say you want to break some houses down, add a big building, a river with bridges etc?

    I could imagine this would be even more awesome if you had several other sets so it was possible to have different types of neighborhoods combined. For example, a layer with the outskirts (shacks, dirt roads), one with the city (as it is now) and then another with the city center (bigger buildings, old fashioned).

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    Quote Originally Posted by Poison View Post
    Wow, this is really impressive! Super fast, easy customizable towns, I'm impressed! Are they easy to tweak? Say you want to break some houses down, add a big building, a river with bridges etc?

    I could imagine this would be even more awesome if you had several other sets so it was possible to have different types of neighborhoods combined. For example, a layer with the outskirts (shacks, dirt roads), one with the city (as it is now) and then another with the city center (bigger buildings, old fashioned).
    thx

    You could easily add a river, a town center and whatever else you want, yes...
    You just need to delete some houses... Depending on your version of PS:
    • For a non-destructive way: group houses layers (and inner houses layers) and use a mask (on the group) to hide what need to be deleted
    • Or you could just use the eraser tool on each layers (house, house shadow, etc.) or even the same mask on each of these layers.


    As i mostly just automated the thing, find me a design for outskirt shacks/dirty roads and i'll automate it for you if its possible
    The biggest problem with Actions are that the reordering is based on the layer indexes not their names, so you need an exact number of layer to move the layer "Whatever" to index "6" for example... So modularity might be kinda hard to achieve without full fledged scripts...

  7. #7

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    This is some impressive work that I am sure a lot of people will find extremely useful.

  8. #8
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    Hello Ogulrok,
    Thank you for your automatic town script, it works really good.
    But it seems some files (styles) are missing in your archive : "Quick Town road style" and "Quick Town tree style", so roads and trees are not styled.
    It say "The object style "Quick Town road style" is not currently available", I can continue or stop. If I continue, it draws houses, but no roads. Idem for trees.
    Is it possible to have these two style files please ? (or maybe I miss something)
    Thank you.

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    Quote Originally Posted by szass View Post
    Hello Ogulrok,
    Thank you for your automatic town script, it works really good.
    But it seems some files (styles) are missing in your archive : "Quick Town road style" and "Quick Town tree style", so roads and trees are not styled.
    It say "The object style "Quick Town road style" is not currently available", I can continue or stop. If I continue, it draws houses, but no roads. Idem for trees.
    Is it possible to have these two style files please ? (or maybe I miss something)
    Thank you.
    Hey, everything should be in there, I tried it a week or two ago, after years. Maybe you forgot to "install" the styles (like drag and drop them into your running photoshop), and it should work. Let me know if you are still having a hard time having it work or if you think that I should update the initial post with more precise explanations. Enjoy!

  10. #10
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    Thank for your reply
    I have already put "Quick Town Styles.asl" (the only style file in the archive) in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit)\Presets\Styles
    I draw my roads, select default color for houses, but when I execute "The Town" script, it say "The object style 'Quick Town Road style' is not currently available".
    So I don't know what's wrong with my step.
    Despite that, the automatic script draw houses along roads very well
    And after that, if I want to draw trees, it say the same things with another style missing : "Quick Town Tree style is not currently available".

    Thank for your help.

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