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City Designer 3 - Auto fill areas with houses.

FizbanFizban
in Mapping with ProFantasy's Software
Hi forum,

New mapper here. Been having lots of fun with cc3 and it's assorted plugging, but having trouble with cd3. I'm trying to make a large city, and I'm wondering if I can just auto fill areas of the city with buildings. I've done the streets, but this has left large empty gaps in my city. I'd rather not have to develop enough streets to make use of all the space available. Any ideas?

Thanks.
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Comments

  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
    Hi Fizban :)

    Welcome to the Profantasy forum.

    If you think about it filling an area with houses that have no roads to them would look a little unnatural, so I would suggest that you carry on adding roads until you have enough of them to call it a city.

    But don't despair. There are lots of other things you can put in a city to fill any gaps you might have, and which in fact make the city look more natural. Think of how many cities there are in the world that have no parkland, or big wide rivers and magnificent bridges, or vast government complexes, or royal palaces, or... the list goes on. You could even put a really large mound in the middle with a castle on top of it, like Edinburgh castle (UK), or have a massive lake where parts of the city are built out into it on pontoons and stilts. I've even seen a city were the skeleton of a dragon half buried in the ground is a major feature, taking up nearly a third of the map.

    I'm hoping that I've given you enough ideas to get you started. All these many and various things would look a bit crowded on the very same city map, and pretty soon all your city maps would look the same, so why not dream up a longer more detailed list for yourself of things that you might quite like to put in a city one day, then pick just one or two of those unique or unusual things and incorporate them into your current design?
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  • FizbanFizban
    Cool ideas, though I was specifically thinking of a mass of buildings (shacks) thrown together into a large slum district. That's fine though, I'll build a fill pattern in PS and do it manually. Thanks for the help.
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  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
    There may be a way to do it automatically. In fact, you could make yourself a symbol fill - where you draw a polygon and the polygon is randomly filled with your chosen symbols - whether they be houses, trees or mountains.

    You would need someone else to help you make one of those, however, since I've never had call to do such a thing, and don't really know all the pitfalls to avoid ;)

    I am sure that someone will be along before long and give you a hand with that, if you want to give it a try?
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  • DogtagDogtag Moderator, Betatester Traveler
    edited December 2016
    Filling city blocks with buildings can make perfect sense in extremely large cities (less likely in richer districts) as well as in small, settlements where space is very limited. Many buildings are then typically accessible via alleys or even through other buildings. When mapping alleys, it can be as simple as leaving space between buildings as you go, using the buildings as a kind of "wall" around the alley "hallways." In some cases, you may not even need to make actual alleys by assuming they're covered by awnings or roof overhangs, but I'd use that method sparingly unless your map is very large-scale (where we could assume we're too "high up" to see small alleyways).

    As for how to do it, there are at least three ways (maybe more), some of which Loopysue mentioned, above.
    1. Manually place symbols. These are often fairly large, so you might want to rescale the ones you place inside the blocks. This is a little clunky for large cities though, which are usually mapped using...
    2. The House command. Manually draw each house. This is easier and faster than it sounds and it gives you freedom to make unique shapes. Search the Internet for pictures of old European cities. Some of my favorite examples are in Italy. Florence comes to mind immediately, but there are many others, in many other countries that could give you inspiration.The Netherlands is another great place to look.
    3. Create a symbol fill via the Draw>Fill with Symbols menu option. There are several posts on the forum that discuss this. There is a particularly detailed discussion here.
    For examples of how amazing the house command looks when used to make cities, check out these inspirational CD3 maps — and tips! — from Gandwarf. Also, he generously provided a free tutorial, which you can find on the ProFantasy User-Contributed Tutorials page (near the bottom).

    I hope that helps.

    Cheers,
    ~Dogtag
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  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    4. You can use the random street options even if you don't have roads, but it will just operate in a straight line in that case. You may want to set the options to pack the houses a bit tighter together int his case.
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