Randomizing City House Creation

[Nytmare]

So after reading through this thread, I decided to play around with some brush scattering in Photoshop and got some decent test run results. Has anyone else tried playing around with anything like this?

[Redrobes]

Sure and the problem is two fold. One is that it looks nothing like a city. No dis - we have all tried and failed. A city looks like something that has evolved and has some structure. Nobody builds totally random houses in cities. I tried to hand pack them together and then carve out roads and it still does not look right. Were all missing something.

Second, all the lighting is wrong. The idea of the thatching scripts for cities is to try to get a uniform lighting and possibly shadowed effect over all the houses. This at least I think we can do pretty successfully tho.

So we need a program that can place down height maps of buildings in some automated but intelligent way and then we can apply textures quite well to make the city. Otherwise its allocate a huge amount of time and use any ole program, PS, CC3/CD or something and manually put down 10000 icons. Hoel has pointed out that this slows down apps and in any case we will have fixed our res and... well a million other reasons why I dont want to go down that path. I want cities where I spend my time defining the essence of it - shape, structure, purpose etc, not jabbing lots of icons down.

Its all very frustrating. Maybe a custom genetic algorithm type app or similar is the only way. Just hoping that there is a short cut that will work.

I think half my problem is not knowing what medieval cities actually looked like in any detail and also not knowing why they made them the way they did - or even what options they had. That would probably cull down a lot of these issues.


http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1932

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=4141

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=3392

[Nytmare]

Here's one with a larger brush size and a purposeful tight cluster to see how it would handle the rooves stacked on top of each other. I think there's definite promise here.

[Nytmare]

I was thinking of it more as a way to make a lot of separate house elements all at once that you could then place to fit.

My main reason for avoiding houses in my larger maps was because I couldn't come up with a fast way to do a ton of rooves that weren't obvious carbon copies of each other with the same basic orthagonal layout.

The only option that presented itself to me was to do close to each one individually by hand which wasn't something I was willing to do. Something along these lines would give me that organic look and feel and cut out the long and boring work.

Also, I don't see how the lighting is wrong, that's natural rendered light from a single source, not random shading.

Remember that that was honestly 5 minutes of screwing around with the brush options and a lighting effect trying to go in a new direction, not a final solution.

[Redrobes]

Oh I agree entirely that there's no fast way of doing it. I don't know the answer and its no slight on you. I was screwing around in a similar way last night on another thread and got a similar result but its not a city. Mine wasn't good at all. I just don't know what to do at this point that does not involve a large programming effort to solve it.

Lighting on second image is better but first has houses with dark on left and dark on right too. Anyway that's not a big problem as we know how we can fix that one.

If there was a really clever random distribution that happened to make nice city blocks then that would be great but I don't think its going to pop out. I think we will need to get the PC to do some work here and think about each house going down minimizing new walls, shortest routes to popular places, keeping roads open and straight, no cut off regions etc etc. There's too much to get wrong for it to come out with a random spread of houses.

I am beginning to believe that it cant be solved simply.

[woekan]

I created faircrest by drawing blocks and then erasing the roads and squares.

I'm not sure if brush presets will work on cities, maybe on towns.

I'm thinking of doing something with pattern overlay's to define the houses in city blocks.

[Nomadic]

I created faircrest by drawing blocks and then erasing the roads and squares.

I'm not sure if brush presets will work on cities, maybe on towns.

I'm thinking of doing something with pattern overlay's to define the houses in city blocks.

This is what I have had to resort to for Palaoyr. Unfortunately due to it's size there is something like 110 blocks to chop up. I am on day 2 of chopping it up and am only 25% done.

[ravells]

The pain will be worth it in the end!

[Nomadic]

The pain will be worth it in the end!

I hope, I just finished chopping up the rich district of the city. I am thinking that I may copy it over to the merchant areas and then do a poorer district and copy it over to everything else. Then I just need to go around filling in gaps and cutting out odd houses.

[Towser]

One thing that I do is make house templates...and copy and paste them far from each other, or sometimes I just change the hue, Saturation, and lightness of one of my house templates and resize some of them. Some of the older houses are probably a little darker and less saturated and some of the newer houses may have more saturation and lightness.I try to think of the weather patterns for the region too. So if the city has lots of rain there are going to be rooftops that have good drainage. or in desert regions maybe they have flat rooftops. I know this won't be the easiest way to put as many houses as you are talking about, but I just put on a good album and go to it!