Best way to make zillions of little buildings?

[ravells]

That's a nice little tutorial, Jezelf. You should cross post it to the tutorials section!

Bear in mind that in real life, when city space gets compressed, individual buildings tend to develop into blocks containing a number of habitations. The way I see it, making a fantasy city with lots of buildings which looks credible is always going to take a lot of time, particularly if you want to imbue your city with a particular character. I had a play with the Roleplaying city generator and found the results to be pretty blah on their own, and slightly better when played about with an image editor. Unfortunately the image editor won't turn a bad layout into a good one, and it's the layout, density, topography and demographics which are all important factors in making a good city.

No easy answers from me, I'm afraid.

cheers

Ravs

[Sigurd]

I like the roleplaying city generator. If you haven't check out pyrranadon's? tutorial for using its random results in Photoshop (or Gimp) do so. Its a lot of result for little effort, but it doesn't quite reach the end result I will be content with.

I guess there's a lot of hand work ahead ....

Sigurd

[torstan]

How about this? It's a bit of an attempt with the mosaic plug-in of Gimp with some gradients and bump mapping.



It's all automated so could be scripted. If it looks worth pursuing I'll see if I can refine the technique.