Making a street-plan - MiniTut

**tomcat** · 03 October 2006, 09:45 PM

After I read so many tuts from this forum, I thought, I might make one by myself. So here it is. It’s just a little example for making a plan – ie. for an invitation for a party or something else (but sorry: there’s no party planed at my house…).

Here we go.

Get a plan of the region you want to make your plan of. You might scan an ordinary plan from paper or get one from internet as well. It doesn’t have to be very much detailed. The main roads and traffic environment should be visible in any way.
Insert the plan in Xara on a separate layer. As we will draw different lines on that plan, I set transparency to about 50%. That makes it easier to see the lines you just made.
In the Layer-Gallery remove the edit-marker from this new layer, so the picture of your plan will be save.
Make another layer for the new plan itself. Put this one on top of the layer with the plan, so that you will see your lines. Make this new layer the active one.
Start drawing the lines in the middle of the roads and railways. Use a thin line width for now (pic 1).
After all lines are drawn, select the lines and change their width to 8 pt. Change the line-color to a dark gray or black (pic 2).
Clone the lines (Ctrl+K) and change the line width of the clones to 6 pt. I changed the color to blue (highway – including the ramps) and yellow (regular street) (pic 3).
Now we have a problem: the smaller yellow street goes under the blue highway. In the drawing it doesn’t. Select the highway (two lines – see arrows on pic 3) and bring them to front (pic 4).
The shadow of the highway should now be over the yellow street and not under it. If we just bring the highway black line to front it wouldn’t fit the blue ramps no more. So we have to solve this problem in another way.
Clone (Ctrl+K) the two shadows (black lines) of the highway. Merge them to one shape: Arrange - Combine – Add Shapes (pic 5).
With the Shape Editor Tool draw a shape over the crossing where the highway meets the other street. In this case you could also draw a rectangle with the Rectangle Tool. Select the combined lines and the new rectangle and cut them: Arrange – Combine Shapes – Intersect Shapes. The result is only a small piece of the shadow. Move it backwards step by step until it gets behind the blue but still over the yellow lines (pic 6).
For the railways I made a little brush. It is made of two shapes – one single line and a rectangle (pic 7). In the sample-picture the fill of the rectangle is colored blue so that you can see it. In reality it is transparent (no line/fill color) and grouped.
After you have drawn this brush, choose the Freehand Brush Tool, push the Create Brush-Button, give your brush a name - that's it.
The railway itself is made like the streets: a line (light-gray), a black background-line and a line with the new brush (made with the Freehand Brush Tool).

http://www.fotosammlung.info/test/plan.jpg

Here we go with a complete sample-picture:

http://www.fotosammlung.info/test/plan2.jpg

Hope you enjoy.

Tom

**gwpriester** · 03 October 2006, 10:01 PM

You do great tutorials!

Thanks Tom

Gary

**Egg Bramhill** · 04 October 2006, 03:41 AM

Great tutorial tomcat,

Another tip worth mentioning is drawing Dual Carraigeways. If you try to draw each side of a dualed road it can be difficult to get the exact distance between the 2 roads as they meander. You can't simply Clone a copy and move it to the left.

The best way to do this is to draw the line down the centre of the 2 roads.
Make the line width 16. Black.
Clone & make the line width 14. Purple.
Clone & make the line width 6. Yellow.
Clone & make the line width 2. Blue.
It helps if you change the line colours to see whats happening.
Select all 4 lines and convert lines to shapes.
Now select the inner (blue) and outer (black) shapes and Arrange Subtract shapes.
Do the same with the other 2 shapes(yellow and purple).

Change the fill colour to suit the road type.

You've now got a dual carriagway that keeps both roads equal distances apart as it snakes over the landscape.

**Big Frank** · 04 October 2006, 06:18 AM

Two great tutorials. Thanks!

**tomcat** · 04 October 2006, 07:23 AM

Thanxs for the good tip, Egg. Very instructive.

Have a nice day
Tom

**matelot** · 04 October 2006, 03:53 PM

Excellent tutorials - I recently was asked to 'officiate' at a funeral gathering for a friend. A lot of attendees were from out of town and province. As many of them lived quite far away Mapquest was their immediate answer but, once they reached the town, just how to get to the funeral parlour and from there to the burial site and then back to the reception site and on to their final destinations was a real problem.
My hand drawn maps were less than adequate, (I had to make reservations at different hotels and homes) and something like this would have been a boon.

matelot