City Map Tutorials?

[Suplex]

Hey, I've been trying to figure out good ways to make maps for towns or cities instead of larger regions. Any tutorial recommendations?

[niekell]

Hello Suplex,
I think it would be helpful to know what kind of tools you have at your disposal to map cities or towns. Campaign Cartographer has a City Designer which is quite powerful if you can conquer the steep learning curve. I recently saw a decent automated town creation website (https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator) which pretty much does all the work for you. Though you can't tweak anything you just have to take what you're given and manually hack the image apart if you want to modify it. Or are you just looking for a guide on what resources should be available in a town such as shops, amenities, fortifications, civil structures? Or how the terrain affects the civic building/planning process?
Best wishes, niekell.

[bkh1914]

It depends on which program you use.

The tutorial sub-forum has some award-winning city tutorials for Photoshop and GIMP.
I'd suggest looking at those. One of them should work for you.

Edit: ninja'd by niekell

[Suplex]

Thank you so much! I'm using Photoshop CS5. I actually found that same city generator, and I've been basing my map off of a good one I found (below). I guess what I really want to know is if there's some tips or tricks to drawing individual buildings other than "just draw the buildings good." Also, just general advice on things to spice up town maps so its less flat and boring.

[Azélor]

I think the only good city tutorial is this one : https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=10421

[Rochnan]

Or are you just looking for a guide on what resources should be available in a town such as shops, amenities, fortifications, civil structures? Or how the terrain affects the civic building/planning process?
Best wishes, niekell.

In which case I'd recommend checking this out for fantasy/historical cities: Medieval Demographics Made Easy by S. John Ross

[MistyBeee]

There is several mini-tutorials on http://www.fantasticmaps.com/ about towns :
- How to Design a Town Map
- A Quick City Map Tutorial
- Drawing Buildings with Dynamic Brushes
- How to Draw Roads on a Map (with the Stroke Tool)
Maybe they can help

[ZoraSpringer]

Oh you just reminded me, that I still wanted to do that... since I do like to draw towns...
What I started with was this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHEsAk_cstY&t=4s (though I really suggest to *first* do a street grid, before you start with the individual buildings (I also don't start with ink at least the roads I sketch before in pencil. But in general for the form of the houses this is a good tutorial, and I think just as much doable in photoshop as it is traditionally ^^

[Azélor]

Drawing buildings and other elements of the city can get quite complicated depending on the level of details you want.

[Gidde]

In which case I'd recommend checking this out for fantasy/historical cities: Medieval Demographics Made Easy by S. John Ross

By the way, it doesn't exist there anymore, but he made a pdf and I found it here (I found an article on his site that said to use google to find it): https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/ima...9684960897.pdf