[Award Winner] Eneini: a medieval city tutorial (in Photoshop)

[automeris]

I am attemting a download of the tutorial for a fourth time. I keep getting 2-3.5 MB in and having the download just stop. I have tried both parts.

While I was waiting I decided to play around with the road thing. I, too, thought Mosaic would be a natural filter for getting sort of random roads.

Here is what I did, just a few steps, and the results:

Using the Gimp:

New Image, 400x400 pixels, RGB, fill with black (000000).

Set the grid to 20 pixels, and snap to grid, and put in a rough grid of magenta (ff00ff).

Ripple (Filters ... Distort ... Ripple) with Antialiasing, edges wrap, sine wave, period 90, amplitude 6, in both horizontal and vertical.

Duplicate the layer. Turn the background layer's visibility off.

Apply Mosaic (Filters ... Distorts ... Moaic) with Antialiasing, Octagons & squares, tile spacing = 2, tile neatness = 0, light direction = 135, color variation = 0. Tile size and height you can play with. For these I used both equal to 20.

Select All (ctrl-A). Copy (ctrl-C). New Layer with fill color ccbb77 (or whatever color you want your roads.) Paste (ctrl-V). Fill with foreground color (I used 552211) (Edit ... Fill with FG color). Anchor layer (ctrl-H).

I don't like the look of the darker color, because there was too much transparency in the mosaic, so lets select the background (road color) by color and paste it onto a new layer filled with the darker color. If I wanted to, I could texture that color here, as well. Discard the other layers. Flatten and save as a JPG. Not worth even saving as an .xcf file because all the steps are so easily duplicated.

Voila: Random_roads1.jpg

The pattern could be more regular if I were more careful with my initial magenta grid, and if I used neater tiles. I was going for random here, starting with something easy to draw in an orderly fashion.

Random_roads2.jpg is with a more regular starting grid and squares for the mosaic instead of octagons.

It seems that attachments appear in reverse order to the order you attach them. Now I know.

[automeris]

When I applied the mosaic filter in the above examples, I did it with color variation of .2, (unchanged from the default,) not zero, as stated above.

And it seems part 1 of the tutorial just finished downloading successfully. On to part 2.

[RobA]

I didn't mean to hijack this thread

To keep the discussion going on random/programmatic street generation I have created this thread:

Techniques for street generation in cities over in the City Mapping forum.

-Rob A>

[pyrandon]

Rob: I don't feel you "hijacked" the thread at all! In fact, you and automeris are doing 100% exactly I wanted: improving that tutorial! I hope I can translate what you are doing in GIMP to Photoshop (the mosaic filters are actually quite different between the two), but I am excited about what you're doing; keep it up (in the other thread, now

If anyone else has any further suggestions/ improvements for the tutorial, please post it & let us all play with it!

Thanks again,

[RobA]

Don-

Can you repost the tutorial pdfs without the background? While it looks great on the screen I want to print it and can't afford the ink

TIA

-Rob A>

[pyrandon]

Great suggestion, Rob--although I sure liked that background!

I reposted both halves of the tutorial with plain white backgrounds.

[MittenNinja]

Very nice tut! I'm working through it now (albeit very slowly, stupid work).

[pyrandon]

Thanks, MittenNinja--make sure to post the results so we can ooh & ahh you!

Also let me know if you see any problems or can suggest any improvements, ok? Thanks.

[Jharviss]

I've been working through your tutorial all day long on a city of mine I've been wanting to map out for a while. It's not a very complex city design, which is unfortunate. Your tutorial would be much better suited for a different city environ. Ahh well! That aside, here's the WIP.

I'm pretty sure I'm sitting at the most tedious step right now. :cry:

I should note that I was looking ahead in the tutorial and reviewing the different filters and embosses you used and I'm quite dismayed--I've gotten this far using Photoshop Elements, the $50 version of photoshop, and I say it's going to be quite difficult to do some of your nifty effects at the end. My building may look a bit dry.

I guess I'll have to experiment.

[pyrandon]

Hi, Jharviss and welcome to the Guild. I'm really glad to see your posting--great start! I like that island-bridge idea a lot.

By "the most tedious part" I'm sure you mean the side streets & alleys, right? I find it tedious too, & we've had some discussion in these boards about finding automated ways of performing the same task (good stuff; read it here), but "by hand" (or "by mouse" or "pen"...) remains my favorite. Two pieces of advice I can humbly offer: 1) take frequent breaks or else your hand will turn into a misshapen claw, ruining your chances at a hand modeling career, and 2) if you are following my esoteric ideals then you need only suggest the existence of side streets, not actually draw each & every one, therefore you can sort of "scribble" a bit vs. having to painstakingly place each one.

The Photoshop Elements is an issue. As I state in the tutorial, I used CS2. If you do find a method in Elements would you mind letting me know so I can put that in the tutorial too?

And make sure to keep posting/updating your image, ok?: I love it!