Houses in a town map

[ale.t]

Hello!
I am about to start drawing a city map in Photoshop but I have one big doubt... houses!
My target is to draw a map that looks similar to THIS ONE (just the style, I mean) especially with the buildings. I was wondering how to reach such a result without having to draw every single house, if it's possible. What about a custom brush? I'm opened to every suggestion you could give me
Thanks!

[SteffenBrand]

There are several options you have:

1. Draw everything. Yes, it's exactly what you try to avoid, but it is also the best way to have nice lines and some diversity. You could copy & paste some sections and rotate them a bit to get rid of patterns.

2. Draw black boxes and copy them. Arrange them the way you like them, create a new layer and then stroke the outlines on a new layer. You would also have the original layer on which you can lock transparency to darken the houses a bit or to use other effects on. You would still have to draw some kind of roof, but it is less work.

3. You could create a brush, but at this point this really will look like you used a brush (or at least not nearly as good as otherwise). Also it would lack diversity and originality on the map. And it probably wouldn't make much sense in terms of the organic growth of a normal city.

I recommend Option 2. It saves some time and you can work with the creating layer as well to get what you want with effects. This step is what I used here: Link.

Hope I helped you at least a bit,
Steffen =)

[Gamerprinter]

First I create the street plan, before placing any building, so I know where to place and not place the structures.

I usually create my buildings as separate map objects. I try to create as many shapes as I plan to include from squares, rectangles, rectangles with open interior courtyards, "L" shaped buildings, etc. After their creation, I grab one or several, and duplicate the images, rotate individual buildings, include more of the square and rectangle shapes, than the more complex shapes. Then place them around.

Its like how I do forests of individual trees. I create a dozen or so different tree variations, then I copy, rotate, move individual trees, as well as groups of trees. Eventually I have a multi-tree forest, that if you look carefully there are only 20 or so individual trees, but with rotations and rescaling, they appear as a hundred different trees, and if you have a half dozen copies of each - you have 600 trees.

Some software (depending on which you use) like Photoshop, GIMP, Illustrator, or in my case Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, allows you to create objects in series and store them as content for a drawn line. Then you draw your line, but instead of an actual line, you are depositing those bulidings skewed to match the direction of the line. So you don't create and place individual bulidings, you simply draw a line and buildngs appear behind your mouse in sync with the streets around it. This makes for much faster building placement.

If you think your project is a challenge, consider that I created a completely hand-drawn city map for Paizo Publishing's The Empty Throne module of the Jade Regent Adventure Path, and in that map, I hand drew over 8,500 individual buildngs, and as described above I included mostly squares and rectangles with "L" shapes, "Plus sign" shaped and open court buildings, being about 5% of the total buildings.

Note, these instructions apply to the bulk of the mass of bulidings in your design. Specific buildings of unique structural design like castles, temples and such deserve individual attention, separate from the techniques described for general buildings.

[wdmartin]

Be sure to read Ravell's guide on the Creation and Depiction of Fantasy Cities. It's not going to help a whole lot with your specific issue (roofs), but it will help with planning the city layout and just generally make you think about things that need to be thought of.