All about city block tiling scripts.

[Ascension]

I hate to say it, because I know how hard this is, but...how would I put streets down with this? I can't find anyplace that lends itself to a street unless I chop out buildings...which is fine, I can do that Just a thought, that's all.

[Redrobes]

Hmm.. what software is this? It looks good but how is it done?
*rubs eyes*

The 3D shapes are done in light wave. They are very rough indeed just boxes with pointy roofs. I made about 20 or so the bunched them together then bunched the bunches etc and filled in holes until I had a large area. Then I export the height map of that. To that I tried using blender again but that program is still going downhill in my opinion. Eventually it crashed so I did it in light wave again and it was fine. Blender has a render ortho mode which is better than light waves but the mode is so damned annoying in its parameters that I lost my rag in the end. In both apps to get the height map you render black mist or black fog linear over the 3D object with mist starting at min Z and ending at max Z. To make it seamless I do in 3D what I do in 2D for my seamless tiles tut. It mentions in there that I got the original concept for that from a guy doing the tiling for paving slabs in 3D.

From there I used my GTS prog and run the thatching script over it. Now RobA has tried pertty successfully to do this with Gimp and its all in the thread Thatching for Dummies.

I hate to say it, because I know how hard this is, but...how would I put streets down with this? I can't find anyplace that lends itself to a street unless I chop out buildings...which is fine, I can do that Just a thought, that's all.

I was just going to drag street lines through it and any building that was partially cut I was going to erase in the same mask then fill in any obvious blank areas with market stalls, crates, a well or some other city furniture. I know its all a botch up but there has to be an easier way to make cities than by placing each house down individually. Whats really needed though I haven't the time to do it is to make a program where it places house 3D models down into areas marked out with a mask so that you draw the city and the house areas and then it fills those areas up with packed in houses. Then render that with the thatch and so on. This is all fairly experimental but I think its better than the patterns done via Voronoi that was used with Gimp/PS etc.

[Ascension]

I hear ya Red, what I'd like to see is something like take a random noise function but instead of using tiny dots make random blocky shapes. Then the program draws lines from the edge of the shape to a center point (for roof lines).

[Redrobes]

Got a woodblock tile one done. Its not all that great cos there just isnt enough res to show the tiles to their full detail. Still, its another option. Looks a bit like thatch that is layered !?

Full Image is here - another 30Mb job.

Will look at a terracotta clay tile next I think.

[Ascension]

That one looks very Nordic to me, nice job.

[Steel General]

Cool stuff you have going on here RedRobes!

[Redrobes]

Thanks and thanks

I have another which is clay tiles.

This one looks great in some places and not so great in others. Basically where the tiles follow the contour well is where they look good.

[Sigurd]

If you had a tile with a transparent floor it might be easier to make drop shadows on the buildings in different orientations.


Sigurd

[Chgowiz]

Any chance you'd be willing to share the tiles themselves as downloadable images? I am thinking that similar to the trees from ZombieNirvana, you'd just have to do some masking/editing when creating streets, but this is fantastic stuff!

[Redrobes]

If you had a tile with a transparent floor it might be easier to make drop shadows on the buildings in different orientations.

Any chance you'd be willing to share the tiles themselves as downloadable images? I am thinking that similar to the trees from ZombieNirvana, you'd just have to do some masking/editing when creating streets, but this is fantastic stuff!

Sorry guys I don't get either question. These images do have a transparent floors and so far I have uploaded all of the full tiles - 30Mb each (links in the posts above). Do you mean the tiles as in textures of the individual ceramic plates, slates and wood blocks ? The textures all come from CGTextures.com as usual. They have them all in super high res and are free to obtain.

The idea is to take these and use them as fills into city regions by erasing parts of them like borders and roads and remaining half houses and then you have your city buildings. You get lots of tile types or thatch so you can put the textures on different layers and choose between them by erasing all the other types or maybe having an index mask which selects one of the set. At least thats my going idea which I will try out right after I have a full set of them.