How do I make an Itty Bitty City?

[bradlavario]

Those tiny cities on these maps:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...-Jasmine-Coast

and...

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...203#post171203

how do you guys make them?

[tilt]

you take a brush with some scattering, click carefully x times so you don't smear the paint and throw a tiny bevel on ... to make it extra nice you use different colors and then perhaps throw in a few towers (big dot, larger bevel) and maybe a line to make a wall

[Lukc]

Itty Bitty City!

Someone should map it

[bradlavario]

My attempt at Itty Bitty City

city play.jpg

For this scale I guess its okay. Still does not look like the pro's.

[atpollard]

Ok, I might be the last person in the world who should offer comentary on this, but I think that you have a pixel size issue for the 'dots' that form your city. If you are attempting to create something on a continental scale, like the links in the first post, then the dots need to be much smaller with smaller outlines and shadows - more of a texture than a representation of any specific object.

The 'dots' as drawn appear to be at a much larger scale, like buildings on an island. To make that scale work, I think that the objects would need to be more rectangular or square with sharper corners and parallel sides - and arranged more in line with the adjacent object to start to look like buildings along a road.

I could be way off, but that's the difference that I see between what you posted and the maps on the opening post. I hope that helps.

[bradlavario]

Naw, you are right, if this was a continent the buildings would be much too big, but this is just an island. I am still trying to figure out how the pros do the tiny tiny stuff.

I am hoping someone will offer up a tutorial on how to do the teeny tiny ones.

[tilt]

I think your cities look good, especially the inland one. What one must remember concerning these is that often it's pure cheating and the buildings wouldn't be viewable like this in respect to the scale of the map - and othe not even as big at the cities are depicted either. But they look good
I'll see if I can get some time to throw together a small tut

[ravells]

You could always try using the RPG city creator, which is a really handy free program (do a search on this site) which makes cities very quickly. Lots of sliders to play with. here's a very quick and dirty example. If you set up the right actions in photoshop, you can just open the image from city creator and run the actions.

[bradlavario]

I tried out the RPG City Generator, pretty cool tool, though for this its still kinda overkill, but I am sure it would be awesome with a city map.

Anyhow, I tried it and another method, and circled them, what do you guys think looks best?

city play.jpg

I think Tilt hit the nail on the head, in order to be visible you need to just claim artistic license and make it out of scale. I spent about an hour looking at google earth, and even in big cities for small region maps, you cant see buildings, just cross patterns.

[tilt]

I think I like B best