All about city block tiling scripts.

[Chgowiz]

The idea is to take these and use them as fills into city regions by erasing parts of them like borders and roads and remaining half houses and then you have your city buildings. You get lots of tile types or thatch so you can put the textures on different layers and choose between them by erasing all the other types or maybe having an index mask which selects one of the set. At least thats my going idea which I will try out right after I have a full set of them.

Fair enough. I was thinking of smaller tiles than entire screen fillers, but now I see what you were thinking and it makes sense. Thanks for sharing!

[Sigurd]

Too tired, I saw the webpage background colour.


Sigurd


Thanks for the tiles.

[Redrobes]

Fair enough. I was thinking of smaller tiles than entire screen fillers...

They are only big because of the res. It depends on what size scale your map is. You could resample them half or quarter size no problem but its obviously difficult to go the other way around so they have to be big to start with. If you had a really small scale map then you might have to resample them into quarters and then stitch a few of the tiles back together again to make a big bitmap again. Its also pretty good to have a big bitmap cos if your map is say 2000 pixels wide and you need the shadows for the buildings in a different direction then you need to rotate the image by say 35 degrees. Then you would cut a 2000 px sized rect out of it to use as the texture. So being one big image is much easier than faffing with lots of little tiles that have to be rotated and butted up at 35 degree angles. Most of my maps are about 2000 - 3000 pixels wide so I thought id well cover myself with a 4K set. I don't want to have to do these textures again - I can see all my cities looking similar but at the same time I am lazy and don't have the time to place all the houses down one by one. Its a tradeoff. The aim is to try to generate a script which uses these so that I can splat down a few roads, paint out a few city regions and stuff and it builds a complete city with minimal effort. Its all a bit experimental and I don't know how its going to turn out but I think it ought to work.

[Chgowiz]

Redrobes, your tiles are fantastic and I wasn't meaning anything bad about my comments. My maps tend to be smallish - 1500x1500 or less, which is why I thought most tiles were < 600x600. Learn something new everyday.

[RobA]

Here I scaled down your pattern, carved some lines through it using a Voronoi pattern then had it delete all buildings that were cut/touched by the Voronoi lines. I'm surprised how many buildings were erased doing this!



It might be necessary to plan road lines better, as some areas (SE) look much better than others.

-Rob A>

[Ascension]

That looks pretty handy except for that spot in the middle with only one building. Still though, not sure if I can do this in PS but will look into it...got an idea.

[Redrobes]

Gonna have a play myself shortly but I think I ought to finish off the set. So here's another 60Mb.... Logs cabins and slate roofs. I think that's enough to go on with.

Chgowiz - wasnt meaning to be offish - just some factual stuff there about the res. 4K is probably overkill but better too big than too small IMO.

[Redrobes]

Ahh I told porkies. One more but this one is a utility version to help me plan the roads better.

Outlines Version

[Chgowiz]

carved some lines through it using a Voronoi pattern then had it delete all buildings that were cut/touched by the Voronoi lines

How did you do that?

[RobA]

How did you do that?

Which - made the pattern, or deleted the touching buildings ?

I got the Voronoi pattern maker from a site that no longer has it there (it shows the site as "under modification").

BUT if you can get any pattern of road lines (even stroked paths or selected mosaic cracks this will work.

0) Set up a stack: city pattern on the bottom, and a black on white road pattern on top.
1) get rid of the shadows from the city building pattern layer using threshold alpha.
2) duplicate the city building pattern layer.
3) Move it above the road layer.
4) Lock the alpha and fill with black.
5) use the magic wand tool with the "sample merged" option ticked and click on one of the roads. You will get a selection of all roads plus connected buildings.
6) grow the selection 1 pixel
7) on the city building layer hit delete.

Now you will have to remake shadows, and fill in backgrounds/roads as desired.

-Rob A>