I want to sketch the layout of a town I'm using in one of my stories for reference. Anyone know of a straight-forward application and/or website where I can do this on the computer? I just need to be able to lay down roads, houses, geographic stuff (like lakes), houses, and buildings. Otherwise, anyone else have strategies/thoughts on how be consistent with the geographical aspects of a long story's setting throughout?
How about a pencil and some paper? Seems like the easiest way to create a map, plus you won't need to fork out the cash on specialist software.
Well, I was hoping for something free anyway. Basically something that would give me something more aesthetically pleasing than anything my chicken-scratch would come up with.
GIMP. It's free, it's excellent. Check out The Cartographist's Guild (it's a website. Look it up) for tutorials. They have excellent tutorials on building city maps in GIMP. Alternatively, unless you need extreme detail, just draw it, as MRD suggested. Think logically. Think about the way a city would, in fact, be designed. EDIT: you ninja'd me. I reiterate my suggestion of GIMP.
Then how about a simple image editing program, MS Paint for instance, or Gimp. If it's just for reference that you want a map, then it shouldn't matter if it's a bit messy.
The easiest way is to use Google Sketchup. I've been using it countless times to export layouts into the 3DS format to be used in Carrara 8.5 Pro. I even tried to create a virtual version of Boston, since one of my animations takes place in Boston due to my story and animation in progress. I've to be honest about this: I'm not a designer but a programmer who happens to toy with 3D software occasionally. TTFN Cynthia
