The Capital

[Bobzilla]

OK...Taking my redundancy and setting up a business with my wife kind of killed off any and all free time I've had over the last two years but I'm back.

I've been having a few thoughts over the placement of housing and I'm going to change a few things about.

So far today I've added in the council's living/admin quarters, the diplomatic quarters and started on the inner barracks.
I think that will do for this afternoon. Took me forever to find the .psd files after all this time!

[Bobzilla]

OK. I'm stuck.

I'm trying to come up with a quick way to make lots of acceptable low cost housing. With the celtic feel I'm trying to get I figured long houses and round houses would be relatively easy but I'm struggling to get anything close to how I want it.

So far I've tried scattering a round paintbrush about and then throwing a few basic styles at it but it's too uniform even if I stick some size jitter on there. What ive settled on is just to hand drawn 'blobs', throw the styles at it and then surround them with a mud path. I'm trying to emulate the style of housing and closeness of buildings from the attached photos but I don't think I'm doing them justice.

Anyone have any thoughts or advice?

[arsheesh]

Well, I wish I could help, but I'm a GIMP user myself, and not really all that familiar with PS. However, it looks like what you are going are thatched huts. Have you had a look at this thread yet? I don't know, it might prove useful to you. Looking great so far BTW!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Ascension]

First, and most important, is that you need more yellow in your roofs...too green. Second, you could try using my thatch brush (link in sig) to get more lines than a chisel bevel will get you. Use the marquee tool, click inside one house to create a selection, click the path tab and turn the selection into a path, stroke the path with the thatch brush, still on the path tab, turn the path back into a selection, select - inverse, hit the delete key to remove thatch lines from outside of the house. Move on to the next house. A little time consuming to do hundreds of houses but it's the best I've got right now. A faster version, but awkward looking and only on round huts, is to use a gradient overlay. Set the style to angle, click on the gradient to edit it - on the pop up where it says "solid" change that to "noise"; where it says "roughness" change that to 100%; where it says "color model" change that to LAB, on the bottom 2 sliders drag the little triangles to the middle to make the gradient black and white. You can hit the randomize button a few times to get something that you like. The more lines that you have in the gradient the less it looks like a tent. Now you can add your color and pattern overlays. Here's a screenie to show what just layer styles can do on a 300-pixel dot.

[Bobzilla]

I'd completely forgotten about the colour. It was carried over from another layer and I'd never got around to changing it
Not sure about it being quite that yellow though. Most thatched houses I've seen have been nearer to brown that yellow.

I'm trying to have thatched roofs that are 'pillowy' if thats a word. I like your path and brush method but I think it might be a bit much work until I work out how I want to place everything.
I've noticed that thatched roofs tend to only show the ends of the stalks rather than the full length so I gave this a try.
Pattern overly with the standard grass pattern. Mode set to darken and opacity at around 50%
Still not as good as yours but for a quick result I kind of like it.

[Ascension]

Not too bad. For quickness, it'll work.