Big Lazy City

[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.

[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!).

[ravells]

Check out this thread for automating the process even further.