Thread: City Map - Old school style

Originally Posted by The-Somberlain

I am working on a map of a large port city. I am trying to achieve an old school style from official TSR maps. I have a long way to go, but I wanted your opinions on the buildings.

Are they crowded enough? Does the layout look realistic? Is this method any good? I am a little confused and I wanted your opinion before spending some more hours here.

General advice when building a largish city(not a criticism, just many times people over look this). Thing about how the city (or even towns for that matter started.) The main thing will walled cities is that in "most" cases, they are not planned with hugh walls and room to grow. Either the walls go up and all the buildings go up also (multiple stories) or they build out and build a new wall in the new sections. In many cases, they would not take down the old wall as it provides backup perimeters in case the initial walls are breached, that is unless they needed the building material the old wall used. This assumes the city just grew organically as people migrated in. Given the number of buildings you have here, there may have even been a fortified keep somewhere in the main city you have already done and the town grew from that, but of course we don't know your back story yet.


Throw this away if the city was planned from the ground up in one fell swoop.

Other then the general comment, I am just waiting for more goodness to come!

Joe

What are you using to make the map with? From a macro level, it looks great, but seen up close, all the buildings are approximately the same size and shape and there are no real spatial relationships between the buildings and the streets and between the buildings to each other. This may not matter if the final version is going to be smaller than you've published it here though and the reader will not be able to distinguish individual buildings.

If you're looking for a quick and dirty way to infill building shapes between streets, have a look at the sticky in the mapping elements subforum of tiling textures, I think there are one or two 'city textures' that might work although that may not be the look you're going for.

Another option is to go online and look for building plans, use GIMP or similar to reduce them to silhouttes, or you could just build your own!

Yet another option (if you have inkscape) is to use a pattern line tool (in which the patterns are the houses). Or if you have CD2 you can do the same with the house patterns ready made. See my tutorial here. It's not perfect, but fast and an improvement on random scattering. Also the frontages of the buildings align with the streets which is a plus.

Making convincing cities (as I'm finding with the city map I'm currently working on) is really time-consuming and challenging. I think much more than mapping large regional areas. I admire your courage in taking on a project of this size!

How large is large?? another thing you should (always) consider is scale ... what scale is the map set at??
you can check out Butch Curry's podcasts on city drawing in PS... he has some good tips if you want to build block-like buildings for your city... found it very useful for that.
What are you using to map with ?