Big Lazy City

[Gandwarf]

That last one looks pretty decent, Ravells. The best you have done lazy style I think.

[Fransie]

Here's another test, I used the brush technique on a city map I was working on. After using the brush, I converted it to shapes, which left me with about a gazillion houses. Next was cleaning up, which was easily done by moving or deleting houses. Then I joined the houses into a single shape, and cleaned up all the little holes etc. About half an hour work in total. I do need to place some landmark buildings by hand, such as churches etc.

Xtreme (unfortunately) doesn't support fills of repeating vector patterns, so this one is bitmap as well. This is good enough on the scale I'm using, though. You could of course clip a bunch of lines to the building shape, as you described (hint: draw two lines, and blend between then with as many steps as you like, much faster than drawing that many lines). One of Xtremes advantages is a very fast redraw time, and this method doesn't slow it down much.

The high number of nodes you have may be because you started out with bitmap shapes. Tracing these often gives a lot of nodes. Of course, joining a lot of houses with a few nodes each still gives a lot of nodes...

[lospo]

I've been footling with Drawplus and managed to get this (would take about 30 mins or so now I have the procedure). It uses line styles to put in the buildings (from Alfar's context free file)....It doesn't really bear close inspection (too many small orphan bits), but I'll keep plugging away at it.

About this thread's very first post: can you send a VERY step by step guide on how can someone else design something similar? I'd like to recreate, but i'd like to use inkscape only. Thanks

[ravells]

Hang in there lospo - I'm waiting for the next version of serif draplus to arrive (should be in the next three days or so) and I want to experiment a little more. As a very rough guide I attach an image I've posted on the serif forums (which is a very rough tutorial of sorts). If you can replicate this in inkscape (I'm sure it must be possible) that would be great.

[Fransie]

In Xtreme, getting from your first step to the last is very quick:

- Draw the lines
- Select them (ctrl-A)
- Use menu-option Arrange->Convert Line to Shape
- Add the shapes together (ctrl-1) (no filled islands here)

Before adding the shapes together I delete any unwanted houses and move others to my liking. Then select all and add them together.

I haven't found an easy way to clean up the rubbish, but doing it by hand is fairly quick, unless you're mapping a metropolis.

It seems Drawplus X4 can import .svg files, so you can start out with vector shapes from Context Free. I noticed that in the pdf's you posted any curved parts were made up of a couple of short straight lines. When starting out with vector you can save a few nodes on every curve. For the squarish parts of the brush, your number of nodes does not differ much from mine.

I have attached a (zipped) Xtreme file with some simple brush variants, for all the thousands of Xtreme users on the forum.

[ravells]

Yeah, the frustrating thing about Drawplus is that it doesn't have a 'convert line to shape' function. The best that can be done is to convert the lines to a high res bitmap and then convert the bitmap back to vector. It works pretty well for larger shapes, but the problem with lots of fiddly shapes like these is that the results are not clean, in fact they're pretty unusable. That's why I have to go through the export as a wmf dance (but wmf doesn't support transparency which is why I get the islands). Hopefully Drawplus X4 should hit my doorstep in the next day or so, I've got the email saying it's been dispatched. Yippee! It really does look fantastic and I can't wait to test-drive it.

I won't even bother posting the Drawplus brushes, given the number of people on this forum who use it, lol. I think apart from me I've come across one other person. Attached is a screenie of the nodes -it's pretty ugly with lots of useless nodes in there.

By the way, does Xara do animations too? You can have various types of building stand out by doing a mouse-over or click on a label. So mouseover / click'Taverns' and see where the taverns are (effectively it just takes you to a copy of the same drawing but with the taverns highlighted).

[Fransie]

Another way to reduce the number of nodes is by using roads made up of straight lines instead of slightly curved ones. What you get now is that two adjacent buildings are at a slightly different angle, resulting in an extra node, while the difference in angle of the facades is hardly visible.

Xtreme can do flash animations, but I've never tried it. Not all of Xtreme's drawing features are supported in Flash, but the major ones are. Another way to achieve what you describe is to make a website with MouseOver effects (I really don't know what I'm talking about here). Never done this either, so I gave it a try. The result is in the attached zipfile, extract it and open 'test mouseover.html'. Five minutes of work, which mostly went into reading the help file to learn how to do it. It's just three rectangles coloured red, blue and yellow. By mousing over one, you give the other two the same colour.

Seeing how easily this is done, I am definately going to use this on some of my maps, it's really cool.


As for the conversion to shapes, I noticed that I can copy and paste lines with a brush applied from Illustrator to Xtreme. Xtreme then asks me how to paste it, as Bitmap, Device-Independent Bitmap, or as Enhanced Metafile. When I choose the last option, it results in a vector object in Xtreme. Perhaps exporting your lines as EMF instead of WMF will skip the bitmap part. Assuming that the building shapes in your brush are vector, of course.

[Natai]

Looks awesome. Any chance we'll see a Photoshop tut?
Repped

[RobA]

Hang in there lospo - I'm waiting for the next version of serif draplus to arrive (should be in the next three days or so) and I want to experiment a little more. As a very rough guide I attach an image I've posted on the serif forums (which is a very rough tutorial of sorts). If you can replicate this in inkscape (I'm sure it must be possible) that would be great.

You can do it (kind of) in inkscape. You can't have 5 shapes repeat randomly as a path stroke that I can figure out.

I made a dozen copies of those 5, then arranged them randomly, pulled them into a line and unclumped them to get this:


Then used this in the pattern along path extension to get this (after converting objects to path and unioning them all)


-Rob A>

[ravells]

That looks pretty close!

@Natai, we're using vector to do this. I don't think it's possible to do in photoshop (or at least to do it quickly) since photoshop brushes only work with a single image.

@Fransie: Thanks for the emf tip, but Drawplus doesn't support emf export. You can export lines as a .wmf though and when you open them, they have converted into vector shapes (which is pretty cool!).