# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Town/City Mapping >  GIMP Brush for drawing Buildings

## RobA

I wanted to be able to put down drawings in a quick but realistic fashion.

To this end, I created a animated brush.  This brush will "paint" buildings along a path.  I set it up to follow the curve with 18 degree image rotations, and it randomly chooses one of four building shapes.

Attached are:

- a sample showing how it strokes along a path (dashed red line)

- sample map using this technique.  I made the roads quickly using paths, stoked them with a wide brush in the road color.  I then selected the road. enlarged the selection by 10 px, then converted the selection to a new path then stroked that with the paintbrush, using the building brush.  A few pretty-ups (buildings were embossed and given drop shadow) and the road was given a gradient overlay to give the illusion of wear (and stroked)

- the gimp brush (if it is allowed by the system).

-Rob A>

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## keithcurtis

I used virtually this same technique to make the small buildings for this map. It's a great way to lay them down quickly, but I think I went back and hand edited a few of them just to give some extra variety.
This was done in Adobe Illustrator.

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## pyrandon

Wow--that is the most clever technique I've seen in a long, long time!  Awesome!  Thank you so much, Rob;  what a huge help this is, especially for village/town maps!

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## RPMiller

I'm guessing that the fill technique that Keith mentioned is what would be used to fill in an area with buildings as well? This is a good technique for a more 'modern' town, but early medieval and most fantasy wouldn't be as structured, or am I wrong about that?

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## pyrandon

I thought that exact same thing the first time I saw this type of town drawing, but in fact the lining of the road method appears to have been typical in the medieval towns of England, at least.  Look at John Speed's set of early 1600s maps for examples:    

http://faculty.oxy.edu/horowitz/home...ed/Cities1.htm

From Speed's depictions we can see that "road lining" was true of even large towns/small cities such as York, but _not_  of large cities such as London wherein buildings are crowded together into true city blocks.

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## Istarlome

@ RobA

hey, you are the bomb!!  this brush is 100%. and the maps you've made are great.  so all is done with the Gimp?

BTW i pm'd you.

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## RobA

> @ RobA
> 
> hey, you are the bomb!!  this brush is 100%. and the maps you've made are great.  so all is done with the Gimp?
> 
> BTW i pm'd you.


I pm'd back.

Yep, that was all in the Gimp.  I can zip up the xcf's of the image and the brush tomorrow (it's on a different computer).

-Rob A>

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## keithcurtis

> I thought that exact same thing the first time I saw this type of town drawing, but in fact the lining of the road method appears to have been typical in the medieval towns of England, at least.  Look at John Speed's set of early 1600s maps for examples:    
> 
> http://faculty.oxy.edu/horowitz/home...ed/Cities1.htm
> 
> From Speed's depictions we can see that "road lining" was true of even large towns/small cities such as York, but _not_  of large cities such as London wherein buildings are crowded together into true city blocks.


Yeah, this is very common. The inner areas were frequently used for plating, livestock, storage, gardens, what-have-you. I just finished a map of 17th Century New Amsterdam (New York), which was a prime example of this pattern.
If anything, the "blocks" of buildings I did on my Tharad map are more unrealistic, being the sort of structure you would only find in much larger and more established cities, once with much more of an outlying support structure.

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## RPMiller

Very interesting! You are absolutely right.

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## RobA

Here is another example of this, a 1581 map of Cheshire:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb....h_chester.html

Same pattern of houses lining the roads and fields, etc in the spaces between.

-Rob A>

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## RPMiller

I can definitely see where the concept of the backyard comes from. I'm wondering when front yards came into vogue. I would imagine it has something to do with the large estates and palaces of Europe.

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## RobA

Just an update.

I am playing with the newest unstable GIMP (available as a binary for windows) 2.3.18 and want to report a couple of new brush features that come in handy here.....

Brush scaling and brush jitter.  Attached are samples....

-Rob A>

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## RobA

Here is a zip of the xcf file for the brush.

The way I made it was to have one layer per rotation angle, with each of the four brush shapes per layer.

It would be easier to enhance by having one brush shape per layer, with all the rotation, but I used a script-fu plugin called rotator that creates a new layer for each rotation.  I might work on something to create rotated copies in the same layer (assuming I can figure out scheme)

Just save it as a gih (animated brush).  I followed the instruction in *Example 3* here

-Rob A>

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## terraficta

Hey, this is awesome! Does anybody know if (and how) it is possible to tell photoshop to use random brush tip shapes for stroking a path? The only thing I know is how to create a random brush through scale, rotate etc - but I don't know how to pick a completely different brush shape...

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## Istarlome

well, that solves one problem. i actually made an animated brush back when you first posted on this topic. the houses didn't rotate so i gave up on it.

how stable is 2.3.18? i'll get way too frustrated if it locks up alot. i'm still using 2.2

this is really nice work and i thank you for yur efforts and for sharing it.  :Smile:

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## RobA

> Hey, this is awesome! Does anybody know if (and how) it is possible to tell photoshop to use random brush tip shapes for stroking a path? The only thing I know is how to create a random brush through scale, rotate etc - but I don't know how to pick a completely different brush shape...


I don't know about photoshop, sorry.  Everyone says the brush engine is much better, so I assume it will do this, somehow.

-Rob A>

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## RobA

> well, that solves one problem. i actually made an animated brush back when you first posted on this topic. the houses didn't rotate so i gave up on it.
> 
> how stable is 2.3.18? i'll get way too frustrated if it locks up alot. i'm still using 2.2
> 
> this is really nice work and i thank you for yur efforts and for sharing it.


Re: 2.3.18, it seems quite stable,  I have been using it almost exclusively since I installed it, and it seems quite solid.  One difference was a change to a different SCHEME interpreter (from SIOD to TinyScheme IIR) that broke a lot of the non-core script-fu I had, though the conversion is pretty simple, if you know a bit of SCHEME  :Smile: 

To make it easier, I'm just sanding the rough edges off a script that will take a base image (or set of images) and create rotated copies and export it as a brush.  Should have it ready for public consumption by the end of the week, if all goes well.

-Rob A>

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## Paul

> Hey, this is awesome! Does anybody know if (and how) it is possible to tell photoshop to use random brush tip shapes for stroking a path? The only thing I know is how to create a random brush through scale, rotate etc - but I don't know how to pick a completely different brush shape...


Matthias, I'm not sure if PS can do that (but I'm still at CS1). Painter's Image Hose rocks at this sort of application, though.

http://apps.corel.com/painterix/trai...id=tpc0705tip2

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## ravells

I found a photoshop plug-in here but I think you have to pay for it.  :Frown:  As far as I understand though, the image hose is a little different to RobA's method, which is common in vector apps (although it looks like GIMP supports it too). 

This is a 'chain line' in which you define symbols that fall along a vector line you draw. You can have as many or few symbols as you want and have the ability to alter their spacing, size etc all at once (i.e. each vector line holds the properties to how the symbols behave). It's a bit like the smart symbol tool on City Designer 2 when you want to build instant streets.

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## RobA

After reading the "zillions of buildings" question, and Torstan's tutorial on using the mosaic filter to make a city, I did a bit of playing.

Starting with a road template made by running the mosaic filter with successively smaller tiles and spacing:


I then selected the black, shrunk the selection by 5 px, turned it into a path then stroked the path with the building brush.

I used a number of copies of that (bumpmap, motion blured shadow, outline, colour noise) to make the buildings.

I used a number of copies of the actual template to make the road and colouring.

I drew a quick wall around it all.  

Lastly I made it sit on a hill  :Smile: 



This is just intended to demonstrate the technique of stroking a mosaic with a building brush.  It would work best for a certain type of neighborhood (see earlier in this thread for a discussion)

Sorry to bump my own post, but I wanted to bring this up to the new people here..

-Rob A>

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## torstan

Bump away - I'd forgotten about this.

On a related note - I can't get this brush to work with your random density map script. I can get other dynamic brushes to work, but not this one - don't kow quite why this should be?

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## RobA

> Bump away - I'd forgotten about this.
> 
> On a related note - I can't get this brush to work with your random density map script. I can get other dynamic brushes to work, but not this one - don't kow quite why this should be?


I think cause it is saved with angular mapping... i.e. it paints based on the angle of the stroke.

The random density script is just drawing points, so no direction.... (that is my guess).

You could open it up and re-save it with only one rank, completely random... then it would randomly use one of the four shapes and some random angle.

-Rob A>

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## Steel General

The master strikes again  :Very Happy:

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## torstan

Well after a little playing with the combination of the random density map and the building brush I get this for the same road layout as in my mosaic map:



Obviously the colours need a little work, but as a way of filling large areas with random building patterns it works remarkably well. Now we just need the random density plugin to resize the brush randomly as well....  :Smile:

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## Ascension

Outstanding use of numerous techniques to solve a problem.  The learning goes on.  Now to work out something similar for PS.  Nice job guys.

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## heathan666

Btw Roba other then saying you are awesome and this is supa sweet, how do I set it up, to use it, being the ubernoob that I am. As of right now I'm trying to make a city map for a game I have however, I did the landscape really nice, but I didn't know how to do the housing, roads or walls, if anyone can help me out with a tutorial that would be much appreciated.
Btw I'm using Gimp.

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## RobA

@heathen666 - specifically what guidance are you looking for?  Have you read through Pyrandon's city map tutorial?  it is readily applicable to GIMP (except for a few of the layer effects and styles used)

-Rob A>

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## heathan666

no I have not, but sense you have suggested it I will check it out. I have actually done alot of work using your random housing brush as I like to call it. I also used some png's of trees that I had which came out pretty decent I guess, nothin' fantastic but it does the job.

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## Sharpe

Thanks for the brush!

How do you get it just to be a solid black (or whatever) color?

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## RobA

> Thanks for the brush!
> 
> How do you get it just to be a solid black (or whatever) color?


The simplest way is to set your foreground and background to the same colour then check the "Use Colour from Gradient" checkbox in the paintbrush properties dialog.

-Rob A>

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## Sharpe

Hey, thanks!

Is there any way to scale them larger without making them... I don't know... jagged-bordered? When I make the Scale on the Pencil brush 2, they have saw-toothed borders.

EDIT: Oh, it seems as though the Paintbrush tool doesn't have the jagged edge like the Pencil.  :Smile:

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## jazzon

EDIT:  DISREGARD, another brush was bad

bump...
Is there a version of this that works with gimp 2.6?  The one linked in post one crashes it.

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## Mosesofmind

Thanks for the brush! City maps I've always had a hard time with and this will help tremendously

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## hitmahip

Hi Rob A,

I'd just like to thank you for creating such a clever tool - for a total beginner these shortcuts certainly make the entire process of building a town less daunting!

However one thing I can't get my head around is how to change the colour of the brush. It always comes out grey, no matter what colours I make the foreground or background colour. I've also played around with the Color Options in Paintbrush Tool Options and no matter what I change it to the paintbrush always comes out grey. 

My canvas is set to RGB.

I don't just have this difficulty with your brush but with all custom brushes I've downloaded - it seems that the only brushes that change colour for me are the default ones.

Thank you very much for your time.

hitmahip

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## RobA

> Hi Rob A,
> 
> I'd just like to thank you for creating such a clever tool - for a total beginner these shortcuts certainly make the entire process of building a town less daunting!
> 
> However one thing I can't get my head around is how to change the colour of the brush. It always comes out grey, no matter what colours I make the foreground or background colour. I've also played around with the Color Options in Paintbrush Tool Options and no matter what I change it to the paintbrush always comes out grey. 
> 
> My canvas is set to RGB.
> 
> I don't just have this difficulty with your brush but with all custom brushes I've downloaded - it seems that the only brushes that change colour for me are the default ones.
> ...


If they are grey, first check to see if your image is set to greyscale or indexed (Image -> Mode).  If it is not RGB then you will not be able to paint in color. 

The second thing is the type of image hose. If it is a full colour brush then it will typically only paint in the created colours, regardless of your foreground and background colour choices.  

Also, brush dynamics in Gimp 2.8 make this sort of rotating brush superfluous, as it supports an angular dynamic out of the box, so a much simpler (and smaller filesize) random building brush would work just as well. 

-RobA>

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## Vellum

RobA  is there much interchangability between PS / Gimp brushes? I'm barely literate in PS and no knowledge of Gimp, but I've found quite a few brushes for Gimp here and elsewhere which might be useful in the future.

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## RobA

> RobA  is there much interchangability between PS / Gimp brushes? I'm barely literate in PS and no knowledge of Gimp, but I've found quite a few brushes for Gimp here and elsewhere which might be useful in the future.


Gimp can use most ABR photoshop brushes (as well as most any image file), but photoshop can not use any gimp brushes, as far as I know.

-Rob A>

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## Schwarzkreuz

Nice Trick, have to try this.

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## Runninghead

Amazing that 10 years  later PS cc still can't do any of this!
I shall be downloading GIMP for Mac OS X and attempting to progress this "brush buildings" concept. Brilliant work! Thanks for the education folks.

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