Basic City. Far from finished.

Hey Folks.
It has been a very long time since I had the energy or time to even think about posting some work up here on these wonderful forums. I have forgotten nearly everything I learned a couple years ago, lost my laptop (which had PS CS3 on it) lost most of my files from that time...so I have had to start anew. I recently downloaded GIMP and have found it to be a nice 'lite' version of Photoshop. (without the insane price tag).

Problems with this sucka:
1. Terrain does not make much sense. This is mostly due to my technical ineptitude and pathetic laziness.
2. Roads. Do they make sense? I suppose they would depend greatly on the terrain.
3. Buildings. This is where I always get hung up on maps. There just does not seem to be a quick easy way to lay out buildings.

I've poured over these forums looking for various tutorials on how to create quick easy buildings that actually make sense. I found (i think it was Ascensions? If not forgive me..) the tutorial using the 'random rpg city generator', but found it a bit too limiting. I really like to get in there and mess with the layout too much. I also found some more complicated tutorials that I really could not understand. Any ways...

The small grouping of brown poo houses is a selection that I used a square brush set to high jitter, basically painted over and prodded until I got the look I wanted. It is very tedious.
Anyways. This is about two hours of research for tutorials and maybe 45 min. of actual painting.

Maybe not finishedd by far this is looking promising. It's always maddening when you start a city and come to the point of ... buildings. There just doesn't seem to be a quick way to get good results (at least I don't know of any as of yet). I once created a square brush in PS that aligns with drawing direction (so buildings can be aligned with streets) and varies in shape and color. No spectacular result but pretty fast, dont know if this can be done in Gimp though. As for the roads I think they could be a bit more straight (they're kinda wiggly now, but that's just me) ... anyway, interesting to see this progress. cheers and good luck with the buildings ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Perfect

3. Buildings. This is where I always get hung up on maps. There just does not seem to be a quick easy way to lay out buildings.

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Welcome to our world :)
People have been looking for quick and easy ways to generate buildings for years (literally, I've gone through back-threads looking, too).

What you find on this site is the best anyone here's been able to come up with so far. But from personal experience, there is no quick way, not if you want them to look "just so".

It comes down to finding a method that will work for you and give you what you are looking for - or at least an option that falls into an acceptable look for you.

Myself, I gave in and manually placed every building in the two I did. It was worth it to me in the long run though, it ended up looking just the way I wanted it to :) Then again they weren't huge cities - and the process I used is the main reason I don't want to do a large city :P

Yeah. I can't think of a quick way to draw buildings...and I think you have to draw them if you want them to, as CM said, look "just so". One recent technique I saw on here involved drawing roads, selecting the space between them, shrinking the selection and then using that as the starting point for your buildings. Seems a reasonable way to get it going. For my Haibianr map [link] I drew the buildings (and all else) in pen on paper and created a selection mask after scanning so I could paint them. For the map I'm doing for the CWBP, Argria [link], I am laying the buildings out as shapes in Illustrator and hoping that they'll come nicely into Photoshop for painting. I expect I'm nowhere near done trying different techniques for city building...as I seem drawn to it despite its horrors.

I use the line tool in photoshop. Then I use the stroke layer style. Then I draw the peak of the roof on it by hand. It takes aaaggggeeees. =P

It can be done in GIMP. I am working on a Brush that can be used to stroke a path/ selection in GIMP. I could not find any out there so I am making my own. I currently only tested with 4 shapes but plane to have an arrya of about 16 shapes for villiage type settings. The next step to take is to build two more brushes for diff densities and building types... The below is my first test of the new brush. I am only very new to CG so have been trying diff scales and techniques like crazy. I am pretty happy with the way the brush works.

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...-Westfall-Vaea

If there is demand I am happy to share the brushes as I go. Is it worth starting a WIP on it? Or can someone post a link to existing resource?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Najmir

It can be done in GIMP. I am working on a Brush that can be used to stroke a path/ selection in GIMP. I could not find any out there so I am making my own. I currently only tested with 4 shapes but plane to have an arrya of about 16 shapes for villiage type settings. The next step to take is to build two more brushes for diff densities and building types... The below is my first test of the new brush. I am only very new to CG so have been trying diff scales and techniques like crazy. I am pretty happy with the way the brush works.

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...-Westfall-Vaea

If there is demand I am happy to share the brushes as I go. Is it worth starting a WIP on it? Or can someone post a link to existing resource?

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Post away! Put it in the mapping resource forum,please. FYI here is one I made back in '07: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...wing-Buildings

(by the way, gimp 2.8 will have rotating brush dynamics, making this MUCH simpler. I've played with development builds, where jittering size, and position, using random selection from a .gih brush and angle dynamics following the path work quite well.)

Also, as a tip, don't stroke selection with such a brush, convert the selections to paths and stroke the path... it will give much better results.

Also, in case someone reads down to here, there is a little tut on making rotating brushes for gimp here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...-Brush-in-GIMP

-Rob A>

RobA,

I spent a good two hours searching for brushes to do this. I decided to biuld my own and now here one is. I won't post this one as it is almost identical to yours. If my other brushes work I will post them up in the mapping resources.

I did see that in GIMP 2.8 reads. I did not see a jitter on angle though which would be nice.

Naj