Another Test City

[ravells]

My latest playing around...it's quick to do, but the buildings don't look convincing....

[Greason Wolfe]

I think the only thing missing for the buildings is a little "separation." They look like a single building rather than a chain of connected buildings. Maybe a little something to show where one building ends and the next begins would help? Kind of like what you did with the city walls, you can almost see how they are sectional. That might give the buildings a little more pop. I'm not really sure, though. I've never had much luck with cities/towns unless I drew them by hand. Other than that, things look fine to me except for a tree that seems to be growing out of the river.

GW

[ravells]

Cheers GW....I'll take another look at it later...I think there are a lot of mis-matches in the drawing...cheers re the tree, noticed that there are a few growing out of the middle of the roads as well, but those are easy to rectify so I might leave them until the end.

[jtougas]

Looks very nice. I can see I have NO business in the city building world..

[Greason Wolfe]

Cheers GW....I'll take another look at it later...I think there are a lot of mis-matches in the drawing...cheers re the tree, noticed that there are a few growing out of the middle of the roads as well, but those are easy to rectify so I might leave them until the end.

Oh, but I like them, makes travel a bit more interesting, doesn't it? Same with the one in the river. Can you just imagine . . . Flash Flood and runaway boats! Mwahahahaha!

[jbgibson]

'Building separation'... you mean like this bit (not)? Main difference with that style is the fronts of buildings facing the streets seem to be mostly a line, with just the 'backs' jaggy. Can your method be tweaked to do that?

[ravells]

So far, most of this city building is automated (I'm just lazy that way), the roads come from the rpg city builder program (they don't look A1, but hey, they're quick), the buildings are created using context free which I just add to a 'vector line style', a bit like an image hose, I then add all the shapes together to get that jaggy feel. That Greenwood map that jb posted is of an ordered 19th Century city, I've always imagined fantasy cities to be more higgledy piggledy (hence the jaggy look), but my jaggy building shapes looks crap as it is.

I've started to draw roof lines on top of the jaggy buildings and I think it helps enormously, it gives that 'separation' that GW mentioned...you can see from the roof lines what the footprint of individual buildings are...the only problem is that they have to be drawn by hand, so you go mad spending hours drawing little lines and get carpal tunnel as an extra bonus, but maybe there's no other way? This took about 20 mins to do...so the whole city will take more than a few hours, but I like the look.

[Ascension]

The angle of the houses doesn't match the angle of the trees. I think that is what's boggling my eyes. Otherwise, good start.

[ravells]

Bit of a change of direction...

[Steel General]

I think this is pretty cool stuff you have going on here Ravs!

Adding the roof lines definitely helped.