[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.