Best way to make zillions of little buildings?

[Redstar]

@Sigurd

Thanks, unfortunately I did draw every building by hand, using the pen tool in Flash CS3. As I mentioned, this took a lot of time, and is often not a necessary level of detail for most maps. One thing I learned, is that a lot city mapping is giving the illusion of detail, without the detail. Like clearly showing main ways, but hiding the details of alley way etc.

The shading and shadowing was done with filter styles in photoshop. Basically applying a harsh emboss and adding a drop shadow. Then I went through and individually colored building to mix up the shading.

RobA's link seems to be the direction I would take if I were to do it again. Make a pattern, twist it and rotate into appropriate angels, cut the streets, apply layer styles, and then go through and a the detail in areas you need it.

[Sigurd]

Torstan - That has real potential.

Rotating seems to hurt the outline the most. How hard would it be to free up the individual mosaic bits to move around but not rotate? Move them around on a couple of layers and then add the layers for irregular shapes?

Redstar - I almost took your map and traced the buildings to steal for other maps. Then I felt bad....

Sigurd

[torstan]

What do you mean by rotating? I haven't rotated anything.

[Sigurd]

The first thing I saw in your mosaic was a palate to pull building shapes from. Make a few mosaic sections and pull the bumps to where you'd like to make buildings.

Failing that you could at least select out unlikely bumps to make the mosaic sections more like the buildings of your imagination.


Sigurd

[torstan]

Ah, so far the mosaic filter has been used within a predefined selection. So you would define the regions you want buildings in and then use the filter. You could use it with different settings for different demographic areas to get different sized buildings. The filter essentially just gives the roads and the colour variation. The bump mapping comes at a later step - so there is no problem with rotation. You just make sure that the rotation happens before you bump map.

Perhaps I should write up a short step by step and you can play with it yourself?

[loogie]

i think to get it to look most pleasing (at least to me) you need to have the many small errors doing by hand ends up with... without the varied versons of the mosaic, which seems to be to little squared... it really all ends up with how much work your willing to do.

[torstan]

Hmm, still fiddling. I think I have a pretty good order of steps down now. I'll post up something tomorrow.

[Redstar]

@ Sigurd

If it's for your own personal use and game, feel free to copy from it. If you end up posting it (but not selling it) a little shout-out is all I ask

[torstan]

Okay. Done a short tutorial. The thread is here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=3392

The result of the fiddling looks like this:
villageFinal2.jpg

[Carnifex]

I tried out doing houses with a brush in Photoshop (playing around with spreading etc) . I've made the brush so I just draw a line where I want the houses and they appear in a "line", varies a bit in colour, size and placement (see the image below).

Yeah, really ugly but it's just a test ok

This is the result so far: