Detchersville

[Alfar]

Here's a little something I put together after reading torstans tutorial on making cities using Gimp's mosaic filter. I tried a few different ways of making the houses follow the streets more or less, and did come up with something pretty simple in the end, so might write a tute on that if there's any interest at all.

The surroundings aren't that interesting here, I'm mostly after comments on the buildings.

[Alecthar]

The areas where you have so much space in the center of a ring of houses seem odd. I mean, essentially every city or town or village has some kind of restriction on how far it expands outward. In a fantasy world, one might think of marauding orcish war-bands and various bandits as an excellent reason to keep your community together. Outlying settlements are hard to defend, and the larger your town is the more vulnerabilities you have. The larger your town, the more difficult it is to transport goods and so forth.

What I'm trying to get at here is that I don't think there's a particularly compelling reason why you'd have so much empty space there. If the town doesn't need to have buildings there then I'd think the town would be smaller.

[Alfar]

Agreed. I was remembering something from Zombie Nirvana, like http://picasaweb.google.com/butch.cu...72642617837394, and I guess I went overboard with the white space.

I'll give it another shot with larger houses, I think - the idea for this layout would be that every house has a backyard, picket fences and such, you know?

[Alfar]

New attempt - a different technique, but I'm beginning to like the results.

Should have placed the lakes according to the bump map before I drew the roads, tho... Live and learn

[Alfar]

heh... and so, the software developer in me took over. I've managed to get python-fu working in gimp under windows, and started coding. Until now, I have a plugin that'll get me from the attached black and white map of streets to the other image with a single click.

I think for a town, it makes sense to have the houses some ways apart, as opposed to a city.

I'll be adding shadows to the houses, and probably try to code some trees as well... The background, I think, is best left to the map-maker, though it would be easy to make a simple clouds with agreeable colouring and a clouds bump map. Any takers?

[RobA]

Hey Alfar-

A couple reference threads on using filters and such to make streets/buildings (in case you haven't seen them):

Eneini: a medieval city tutorial (in Photoshop)
Techniques for street generation in cities
Reload this Page Best way to make zillions of little buildings?

-Rob A>

[Alfar]

Hey Rob

yeah, that's all well and good, but they're mostly for cities. I'm trying to make towns.

Does anyone have an opinion about where it's more likely for streets to be built - highs or lows? Neither?

I'm trying to find a way to make my houses more rectangular. Pondering having a collection of building brushes and trying them out at random for each area I want to have a building in - slightly miffed that there's no simple way to rotate a brush, though. Ah well.

Another way I've been thinking it to draw a path inside each area, and then stroke them all. Not sure how well that'll work, but worth a shot, I guess.

[Map Vandal]

Does anyone have an opinion about where it's more likely for streets to be built - highs or lows? Neither?

Lows. That way stormwater flows off properties and into the streets and possibly gutters.

[waldronate]

Does anyone have an opinion about where it's more likely for streets to be built - highs or lows? Neither?

It depends on why your town is there in the first place (which has a significant impact on the type of land on which the town is built). Many classic towns were built on hilltops or ridgelines to be more defensible. In that case the streets are built going into the hilltop fortification or along the ridgeline. If the town exists at a ford then the road is likely to cross the waterway at rougly right angles. A town at the intersection of two major roads is likely to form a grid-type section of roads around the intersection. A linear town built on a road paralleling a waterway will have the road neither higher nor lower than the buildings.

[Alfar]

Thanks, Map Vandal - that does make sense. So a street is kindof like a river