Randomizing City House Creation

[Nomadic]

I am currently mapping out a massive trade center city for my world and I have just finished getting the walls, streets, and house areas in place. The problem is that the city has a population of about 115,000 people so there are thousands of buildings. I was wondering if anyone had figured out a way to create a random scattering of various houses. I know there's a tutorial for doing this in gimp via mosaic but I am stuck with photoshop (and photoshop's mosaic filter is nothing like gimps). So any ideas as to how one might pull this off?

[ravells]

Finding a city generator which will produce credible looking cities is a bit like finding the philsopher's stone. There are some automated city generators out there if you're not particular about what your city should look like.

I still remain somewhat convinced that someone who is good at programming could make something with 'Context Free' (google it). I think Redrobes is working on something.

Vector programmes have a brush setting where you can put down 'house shapes' at random following a line, so you can populate a street very quickly that way, (CD3 has a similar option) but the results are a bit 'meh'.

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.

[waldronate]

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.

[ravells]

Fantastic, thanks Waldronate!

[Vandy]

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

[Redrobes]

Good links Waldronate.

I would like to program something but so far I haven't started and I don't have enough time really to do it.

[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.

[Ascension]

I hate to plug myself but you might want to look at my Brownstone map. There are some sections there where I basically just ran a fat (21-pixel) square pencil to make some lines then went back with a 1-pixel eraser to carve out a tiny line...this layer was then given an inner bevel (chisel soft) to create roof-lines and then a 1-pixel stroke to hide the cut out lines. You can't really apply a thatch pattern overlay to the resulting shape so that's why the chisel soft bevel was used (it puts some lines in). If you'd like I could probably do up a quick tut for that, it's not the greatest but it saves a whole ton of time.

[Nomadic]

I hate to plug myself but you might want to look at my Brownstone map. There are some sections there where I basically just ran a fat (21-pixel) square pencil to make some lines then went back with a 1-pixel eraser to carve out a tiny line...this layer was then given an inner bevel (chisel soft) to create roof-lines and then a 1-pixel stroke to hide the cut out lines. You can't really apply a thatch pattern overlay to the resulting shape so that's why the chisel soft bevel was used (it puts some lines in). If you'd like I could probably do up a quick tut for that, it's not the greatest but it saves a whole ton of time.

A tutorial would be awesome.

Edit: haha my title now matches my name.

[ravells]

I suppose I can just throw it up here as an unpaid job for someone with more skill than I in GIMP.

Good Luck! I think the short answer is (so far as I know anyway) there are no short cuts to making a convincing looking city. Good cities with lots of detail take an age to draw.