Circular city wall help?

[simpfan1]

Ive been looking over tutorials for walls and they seems to mostly be made up of straight pieces
anyone have tips on how to make a completely circular wall in photoshop?
Im making a city map, and the city is sort of made up round walls, so its rather necessary for me to figure this out

attached is just a sketch of the city
ive never drawn a city by hand before, but I decided to give it a go today
i think it turned out pretty ok
I know some of the lines are wonky, my hands are jittery, even when using rulers and a compass and what not @-@

[tilt]

an easy way to do a circular wall is to use the circular marking tool, mark the outer boundries.. then going back to the center - use the "subtract" button to make another smaller circle within - you'll end up with a "donut" then make a new layer and fill it

oh.. and very nice sketch

[simpfan1]

Oh yeah thanks!
Isnt it funny how the simplest fixes sometimes slip your mind? :p

oh I did have two other questions
what is the hotkey to center a layer?
and how can I make circles from the center?

[simpfan1]

Ok I figured out how to expand from the center and how to use subtract, but whenever i try to use subtract and from the center, it never works. It either expands off center or gets rid of the first circle

[tilt]

there are two ways to do that - either by clicking on the "subtract button" before you draw the second circle or by letting go of the ALT key (which subtracts) while still pushing the SHIFT for an even circle and then pushing it down again - since you're allready subtracting it now knows you want to draw from the center again.

[ravells]

Hi simplefan, it's pretty easy in photoshop to make walls. Here is one suggestion.

Load your reference picture.
Make sure you rulers are in view: view/rulers
Make sure that you have enabled snap to guides: view/snap/guides.
Drag out a vertical and horizontal guide which intersect where you want the centre of your circle to be.

Create a new layer, call it 'base'
Use the elliptical selection tool. Hold down Shift (to constrain it to a circle) and Alt (to draw the circle from the centre). Position your cursor where the guides meet and drag out a circular selection so that it runs along the centre of the inner and outer edge of where you want your wall to be.
Then click Edit/Stroke, choose a colour to suit (say gray) and the thickness of your stroke (which will be the thickness of your wall). Click OK.

Create a new layer, call it 'Walkway'.
With the base layer active, use the magic wand to select it.
Now make the walkway layer active and choose select/modify/contract. Choose a thickness which will give you what will be the 'walkway' area of the walls.
Fill that selection with a slightly darker colour to the base colour.

Create a new layer, call it 'Crennalations'
Press F5 to bring out your brush menu and choose a hard square brush. In the brush tip shape menu drag out the spacing to over 100% so you have a gap between the squares. In the shape dynamics section, set Angle Jitter to 'Direction'.
Now make another circular selection (using the steps used above) so that it lies half way between your walkway and the outer edge of the base.
Select the 'Paths' menu (it should be to the right of your layers tab, if you cant see it, then click Window/paths)
At the bottom of the paths menu there should be just one active button (it looks like a circle with a path arcing over it) and click it to make a work path.
Two buttons to the left of that is another button which looks like an empty circle (stroke path) and click that. Your work path will now be stroked with the brush selection you made earlier.
You may have to undo and set the brush size and spacing of the crennelations brush to something you prefer. When you're happy delete the work path.
If your crennalations come over your walkway, then just drag the crennaltion layer below the walkway layer.

Finally just add some layer styles (bevel and emboss / drop shadow etc) to give it all more definition.

I've attached the .psd file below so you can have a play.

[Carnifex]

Create a new layer, call it 'Crennalations'
Press F5 to bring out your brush menu and choose a hard square brush. In the brush tip shape menu drag out the spacing to over 100% so you have a gap between the squares. In the shape dynamics section, set Angle Jitter to 'Direction'.
Now make another circular selection (using the steps used above) so that it lies half way between your walkway and the outer edge of the base.
Select the 'Paths' menu (it should be to the right of your layers tab, if you cant see it, then click Window/paths)
At the bottom of the paths menu there should be just one active button (it looks like a circle with a path arcing over it) and click it to make a work path.
Two buttons to the left of that is another button which looks like an empty circle (stroke path) and click that. Your work path will now be stroked with the brush selection you made earlier.
You may have to undo and set the brush size and spacing of the crennelations brush to something you prefer. When you're happy delete the work path.
If your crennalations come over your walkway, then just drag the crennaltion layer below the walkway layer.

Great ideas! Needed a good way to do crenelations and this really worked. Thx.

[tilt]

nice crenelations ravs ... thanks for that, I'll remember that when I get around to my own (still placing houses).

[ravells]

Cheers tilt, I've never actually made walls like this before, but it looked like a fun challenge! I reckon you could probably automate a lot of the process into an action so all you'd need to do is to draw the initial selection of where you want your walls to be and the action would do the rest.

[Steel General]

Neat stuff here Ravs!