Thread: Capitol City of Turimor (GIMP)

Yep, you definitely need to dense things up
Some people have tried to find easier ways to create realistic looking cities without a lot of work... I think Ravells is onto something at the moment with his "Lazy Man's Style":
Lazy Man's City

Anyway, your map certainly isn't looking too shabby at the moment!

There are most certainly faster ways (see gandwarfls post for example), but the best ways in my opinion still involve the manual placement of houses and other objects. That's just the way it is unfortunately. City maps can take me upwards of a week to create (compared to 2-10 hours for a regional map). I will say though that when you are done you will feel alot of pride in what you have accomplished.

I think the map generated by the City Generator can still be useful, its given you 'nodes', lots of them for creating a more believable city structure... all you have to do is a night or 2 of "connecting the squares" and making them more dense and larger 'implied' city blocks, etc...

Yeah, right now, I'm debating between hand-drawing/copy-pasting more densely populated city blocks or fiddling with one of the lazy-man techniques Gandwarf linked to above.

I wonder if I can use the Roads layer in my Gimp file to select individual city blocks (well, I know I can select them... I wonder if it would be helpful), thus setting up some bounding edges for my work and just draw or filter one block at a time... depending on what works.

I tend to be a bit ADD when mapping or working on any creative project, for that matter, and have spent the past several days distracted by a structure-mapping diversion that I hope to post soon... if I don't get distracted back the other direction before its done.

Okay, I finally got around to working on this thing some more. I reinstalled GIMP with the Python extension and downloaded the lazy man's city generator script. This is what I have so far after running the generator to create my city core and then adjusting the coloring to tone down the buildings' saturation.

I haven't decided if I like it. I feel like it is a bit too messy... but then medieval cities were really freakin' messy! I think the biggest issue I have is that the city generator does not produce landmark looking buildings. I may need to go back in and attempt to add some places of interest and obvious city planning elements by hand.

I like the golf courses to the left of the city center

Seriously, that's what I thought the one looked like at first. I say keep it

Yeah, I haven't even touched the greenspaces yet, so the golf courses were all generated by the RPG city generator that I used to set up the original layout. I'll probably have to hand draw the little sand traps and flags.

Hmm... I have to say I am not a big fan of this city style. The city blocks look too much like mosaics to me unfortunately

Gandwarf: Yeah, I think that is part of my issue as well.

I am tempted to actually scrap this particular style of map in favor of something that appears more hand drawn. I am thinking about changing to an ink on parchment look, doing away with individual building drawings all together and instead perhaps color-coding or grayscale coding the city blocks based on their district affiliations, and only drawing in the significant landmarks like the castle, guard barracks, temples and markets. After all, the purpose of maps is not necessarily to look realistic, but rather to help people figure out where the heck they are going!