Big Lazy City

[ravells]

This one is with the line elements smaller....better street definition and more intricate doodads but you start getting 'island' effects inside city blocks.

[mearrin69]

life's too short to spend our time rubbing bits out with the eraser.

Repped for awesome city technique R&D and an even "awesomer" quote...
M

[tilt]

looking really good now - nice techique - I'll quickly throw some rep your way

[ravells]

Thanks guys, needs more fiddling with...I'll keep experimenting.

[Steel General]

Ravells - Lawyer by day...mad city builder by night

[ravells]

Yeah, being a lawyer is my hobby. Mad City builder is my profession <g>

[ravells]

I've been fighting all day to work out how to get these line style buildings to combine so I can outline them in vector (I was previously doing it in photoshop). Finally got there by having to export the layer as a .wmf file and then opening it, converting it into curves and then merging them a bit at a time (merging the buildings all at once made Serif crash). The joy about this is that it is all still pure vector so it's resolution independent which means that if you save it as a .pdf, you can zoom in as much as you like with no pixellation. It should also make labelling easy to read as well (no matter how small), but the file size is huge.

[tilt]

Looks really good, a very good starting point for a city

[Fransie]

This is a great idea! I've been experimenting a bit for myself. Context Free can save an image as .svg, which is vector. I rendered a few and converted these to Xtreme. Then I joined every building (they're made up from about four shapes each), selected all and made a brush (Xtreme can only use 50 shapes in a brush, but that's enough to get a nice random result. And you can always make more brushes if needed). I applied the brush to a road pattern in one of my maps, and after fiddling a bit with the brush settings got a fairly nice result. Then I converted the whole thing to editable shapes, joined them and applied a hatched fill.

The result definitely needs some cleaning up, but (in my opinion) it already looks better than my original, which took me ages to draw every building by hand. Whereas this method only took me fifteen minutes!

This definately has potential.


Frans

[ravells]

Cool! I'm glad someone else is trying this too so we can compare notes.

I really like the first one. Weirdly enough Serif Drawplus doesn't support SVG imports, the community have been complaining about it for years so they've now supported it in the new version of Serif which has just been released (I'll be getting this soon). This is great as it means I can import the context free results direct as SVG (cleaner curves) rather than converting the bitmap with autotrace which leaves lots of nodes and makes the file size huge. This is my next effort, I've started to (clean up my image to get rid of all the little artifacts (see the southmost part of the map). It's not not as time-consuming as I thought, but it still takes a while. Do hatched fills come as a standard fill with Xara? Is it a vector fill? The only way I can do vector hatched fills in Serif is to make a bunch of closely spaced lines and then crop them to the building shapes but it really starts to make the computer chug. Part of the reason why I think my files are so big is that the curves are really 'dirty' with loads of nodes which don't need to be there, so a big part of the process for me is getting optimal file sizes too.

Let's keep comparing notes and methods. Once I'm satisfied with the procedure / results I post up the procedure I've used.

Best

Ravs