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Path making is hard.

I wish I had the slightest artistic ability to create my own paths, but I suck at drawing and so, I just scour the interwebs for paths. I'm usually able to find pretty much exactly what I'm looking for, so it all works out in the end.

Happy little mistakes. All I did was experiment, really. I took a small portion of my boyfriend's own home made paths, he let me, and from there on it was my own dojo. He started a tiny corner for me, and then I kinda just wung it. It started to look lile something, and as I was going, I got an idea of what I want. I kinda almost ended up with a happy little mistake. The whole time I was thinking of new things while making it, and then I had it done. It still took a while though. Probably an hour, I didn't keep track.

- - - Post Merge - - -

My path still isn't even his path, because when I tried to replicate part of his path, some line work, I actually managed to mess it up and make a different set of lines lol.
 
Walk around where you want paths, and you'll soon have beautiful natural dirt paths. The way it should be.

That's probably waaay more time consuming than making paths. Plus if every town had dirt paths instead of mixing it up with we codes the itd be. Very boring.
Also if it's the way it /should/ be, then Nintendo wouldn't have allowed putting qr codes on the ground in the first place.
 
Each to their own. I like being able to catch insects, and shake fruit, without it vanishing on a pattern. I guess I find the natural state of a town more beautiful, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.
 
I designed all my paths as well... And I must admit - it really takes a long time to do, even with art skill. But it was totally worth it!

My best advice is to first ask yourself: What kind of feel are you going for in your town? Start with a rough sketch on the pixel editor, and don't worry about the bordering, realism nor precision. Think maybe the colors and lines it may have, and stop there - It will be changed later.

Next, scour the Internet and find references of certain pavement that match what you are thinking of making. Don't draw with them right away - analyze them carefully first:

-Look carefully at the particular colors they have. A good way to figure this out is open the images in a photo editor, zoom into them, and play with a color picker. You may notice how dim and faded the colors are in many paths - but they aren't usually fully grayscale.

-Look at the textures and shading, both when the images are zoomed in and out. So might see how a rugged texture force little pixels of a lighter/darker shade of color to scatter in the main color of your potential pattern. Smoother ones have less of this 'noise,' and instead, the shades blend in lighter/darker from the light source.

One you get all this figured out, notice the light source in the game: It seems to hit the models from the west, going east to you. with that in mind, flesh out your sketch by adding the shading, colors and textures you saw from the references. I tend to add a highlight next to the right side of pavement grooves, and never really use pure black. Always look back at the reference images as you do this, and do your best to draw more of what you really see.

Truth be told, it took a lot of adjustments over a few weeks to get my path to work the way I wanted it. But if you put in the right effort, you won't be let down by your own work!
 
I tried once but got frustrated. I find it a lot harder to make a path layout.
 
Each to their own. I like being able to catch insects, and shake fruit, without it vanishing on a pattern. I guess I find the natural state of a town more beautiful, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

Yeah, it honestly is really weird that items can't be placed on top of paths
I honestly would use natural dirt paths, but it's a bit tedious.
 
I did make a path pattern for my town and it took forever. I just placed 9 of them on the ground to make sure my random lines would line up on the edges. My path only uses a main walkway option and a border one since I like to keep some pattern spaces for clothes and other designs.

HNI_0067.JPG
 
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