Randomizing City House Creation

[Nomadic]

All I can suggest, if you are using photoshop, is to start out with your city as a single solid black shape. Download some references from the web as to what you want your city to look like and start to carve out negative space from the shape using a white brush. It will take ages though.

Sadly this will not work, a city of this density means that there shouldn't be any space between houses outside of the rich district. What I really need is a way to put houses edge to edge like you can do in CD. I am thinking of perhaps carving out every other house in order to do this but again we're talking cutting out 10,000-30,000 houses by hand. Not a fun endeavor.

http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmuell...ggraph2001.pdf is a good paper on the subject of procedural city generation. There have been a number of others SIGGRAPH papers on the subject in recent years.
http://www.citygen.net/ is also fun.

Interesting read, though a bit above my head as I have never been good at combining my two hobbies (graphics and programming).

Hello, Nomadic.

To build upon what ravells posted, you might want to read through the following two tutorials to get some "pointers":

A medieval town map tutorial in Photoshop

Eneini: a medieval city tutorial (in Photoshop)

Good luck.

Regards,

Gary

Yes I have read through both of those. In fact the first one is what I use as inspiration for my smaller towns. The second one though in my opinion isn't any good. The building shapes are unreal and the texture is very blurry. However, I don't think it is any fault of his. Photoshop's noise filters are somewhat sub par compared to GIMP's.


So then I guess I will just have to get it done in GIMP. I will give it a try myself, if it doesn't work I suppose I can just throw it up here as an unpaid job for someone with more skill than I in GIMP.