an attempt at a city

[Najmir]

Lone,

I had planned to work on some high density techniques/ I saw your post and thought I might have a look at the issue you have as a wip into my own technique. It is 1 am so I only gave it half an hour.

The below post shows an alternative to Tal's technique. This one uses animated brushes with random sizing to build up the buildnig lines. Then some texturing, bumping, and shadow to give the city area with flat topped desert(?) style roof tops. This technique still has some issues but i dont know if it is any closer to what you are looking for?



I hope you dont mind that I used your map to show a comparison? If so, let me know and I will kill it.

The random brush size is a little too random. If i get time tomorrow I will build a brush with a smaller range of random building sizes and try that out.

Anyways let me know if you are interested.

Naj

[LonewandererD]

No worries Naj, go ahead and experiment, it's nice to see what others can come up with. You'll probably succeed where i've failed.

As for buildings, i've decided to go in a new direction. Before I was aiming for stone buildings, now my buildings will still mostly be stone but with high pointed tiled roofs (these would the only visible part of the buidling seen from overhead, think buildings with a slight oriental feel), so i need to come up with a new brush that allows me make random rectangular houses. The idea behind my houses is that the main living quarters would be a large hall (in the local tongue the word for hall and home mean the same thing) with other rooms built off it or above it so i need rectangular houses with the odd add-on. The houses in the common districts need to be grouped close together but with some open areas, cluster people too close together and you get squalor and the Dal People are very touchy when it comes to squalor, also they believe that such close qaurters would bring some people together that shouldn't be brought together. Experimenting with this idea now, probably won't succeed but its worth a try.

-D-

[Najmir]

Have you got any techniques worked out. I have something similar that I used in my Shadow Crest WIP map that I have on CG. Though I made it less dense than you are looking for. I went for the tiled effect with standard roof shapes not so spikey.

If it looks like you're heading down the " probably won't succeed" let us know and I will give it a bash.

Anyways, good luck!

[LonewandererD]

Okay, so i hit the end of the "not succeeding" path and decide to screw it, I'm doing it the hard way. So now i'm doing all of the buildings individually, i'm still experimenting with a buidling brush and saved my original work to a new file just in case but now i must move on. The first pic below is the rough plan of where things are going to go, the light brown represents commoner residential areas, the dark brown is warehouses, the earthy brown is commercial areas like docks and workshops, the bright red are special locations, the dark red is the noble area, the really light blue are mills, the medium blue are ferry points and the dark blue are the houses of the warrior caste. The green was supposed to be swatches of trees but that is being discontinued. This plan is greatly subjected to change and i'm changing roads as I'm going along.

The second image is what i have done so far. I've completed the warehouses and dock areas and put in the details for both, i'm now carving the city up into blocks for the rest of the housing. A major downside is that the city is now going to be a lot smaller as a result, more of a large town instead of a real city.

-D-

[Al. I. Cuza]

Nice work. I only have one question: Why does the city have walls near the cliffs, which are perfectly good natural barriers?

[LonewandererD]

Hmm gotta think about that. Besides just adding a litte extra defence to the keep i'm going to put there, each of the towers on the wall holds a large defensive weapin, sort of making the area an artillery position. I'd say the walls are there to protect against land attacks, alos i had planned to put the city/town prison up there so the walls were also supposed to keep people in. Now that i don't really have a jail for the city i'm trying to come up with something imprtant enough to be kept up there. Will have to think about this.

-D-

[Najmir]

I dont envy you having to draw all of those places in manually. But on the plus side the docks and wh areas are looking great!

Good luck m8

[Gandwarf]

I am glad you decided to do the buildings by hand. It's a lot of work, but it will show...

[LonewandererD]

Yeah, i agree with you on that Gandwarf, it is going to look so much better. I just whipped this up now, it isn't fully detailed yet but this is the central island area.

-D-

[Najmir]

Lone,

That is looking great.

There is only one minor thing that seems a little out and it may not even be of concern with this style. Some of the buildings appear to have shading on diff sides of the roof. It is really only noticeable when the buildings are next to each other and running the same way.