Procedural Buildings and Cities

[moodflow]

Well, we currently have procedural trees, plants, and grass (or ways to generate them, like arbaro, bantam 3d, xfrog, onyx tree, etc).  Now we could possibly have procedural buildings, and cities:

http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Documents

I was checking out the Siggraph website, and found this link from 2006.  Pretty interesting stuff.  I didn't see any links to a usable application, but it atleast shows this stuff is in existance.  This would be great for some of those big city scenes...

I'll be going to the Siggraph Convention this year since they are having it here in San Diego.  I'll definitely be looking for stuff like this.  Of course, I've never been before, so we'll see how it works out.

[old_blaggard]

Looks promising!  I would love to be able to import the buildings, or, better yet, the entire city as objects.  Oh, and does anyone know if they plan on holding Siggraph anywhere in the Midwest in the relatively near future?

[Mavcat]

Wasn't there already a plugin of this sort for C4D? I'm probably wrong Well,it looks very nice,but the copyright says something about 2004,hasn't been updated for a while...

[Sethren]

WOW! I have been looking for something like this. It's to hard to model every single building for massive metropolis' ala Blade Runner. I hate it when these University guys come up with some nice innovative software and never finish it and release it to the open public. The project just sits there with some research papers to read only.   

[glen5700]

XSI just came out with a pretty cool script - http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=29;action=display;threadid=31380;start=37, it works quite well. Here is a down a dirty export (obj) into Terragen 2, no textures.




Here are a couple other links off XSI Base-
http://www.photogrammetry.ethz.ch/tarasp_workshop/papers/ulm.pdf
http://www.cmivfx.com/product_houdini_cities.asp

Here are one's that I came across-

http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tommer/citygen/ it out puts to VRML 2.0 which I can translate through Rhino (4.0) - I have not brought this into Terragen 2 yet.

http://www.vterrain.org/Culture/BldCity/Proc/index.html a page on Procedural Buildings and Cities

http://pcity.sourceforge.net/ I haven't checked into this one yet...

http://www.geocities.com/ccolefax/citygen.html POV-Ray, it's listed from the above link but I thought it might be worth pointing out. Maybe PoseRay can get some geometry for Terragen 2.

HTH,
Glen

[Sethren]

Don't have access to XSI so that will have to pass.

The houdini cities look promising and i have houdini 9 apprentice.

CityGen top me looks mediocre.

PCity looks like it's worth a look.

Citygen looks semi-promising but it's outdated.   

CityEngine looks the best.

[Moose]

The houdini cities look promising and i have houdini 9 apprentice.

I have this DVD and really it's top-class - lots of nice little tips and tricks... incase you were scouting for a recommendation, that is . Though it's worth noting it's for H8 not 9, but if you're already au fait with 8 transposing to 9 won't be a prob, otherwise the recent UI changes may make this a tad more challenging(??). Additionally, Chris offers a glimmer of encouragement in this post - http://cmi.myfastforum.org/sutra505.php&highlight=houdini#505.

Concerning the actual DVD content... although it does provide you with a finished 'make-city-now-tool' of sorts, it's far more valuable in the knowledge it imparts wrt building your own custom tool(s) tailored to your own requirements.

P.S - (off topic) if you're interested in learning Houdini, David Gary (CMI instructor) posted a free teaser to a DVD he's developing covering noise creation for fractal terrain and water modelling - http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials.asp - (Tutorial 57: Creating Noise Spectrums in VEX) if you weren't already aware...

[Mavcat]

I found the c4d plugin: http://plugins3d.com/plugsc4d/006.htm Dont know if its procedural although

[moodflow]

WOW! I have been looking for something like this. It's to hard to model every single building for massive metropolis' ala Blade Runner. I hate it when these University guys come up with some nice innovative software and never finish it and release it to the open public. The project just sits there with some research papers to read only.   

I agree 100%! 

If you checkout the Siggraph papers, you'll see some amazing stuff, and it either never finishes, or they try to sell it out to some major graphics company (which I don't blame them, but then the hobbyists don't get to use it).

[cyphyr]

If you've got Lightwave theres a plugin called Citygen (not the povray one) by Eki that makes procedural cities based on a ground plan. The results can be good, also can be well er not so good
Richard

[Mavcat]

If you've got Lightwave theres a plugin called Citygen (not the povray one) by Eki that makes procedural cities based on a ground plan. The results can be good, also can be well er not so good
Richard

Isnt that the same plugin as the c4d one? i remember it was made for a lot of programs.

[moodflow]

Thanks for the links glen!

[moodflow]

City Engine appears to be the best by far.  That guy should be at Siggraph in a few weeks and I'll go over and check it out.  I'll be bringing my flash drive just in case he's generous (though I won't push the issue)  ;-)

[moodflow]

I just dug up an old unfinished image I was working on in Bryce, that featured a huge city I had created using image maps as height fields. 

I took those image maps (originally created in Photoshop), converted them to 3ds objects in Bryce, then used PoseRay to make .obj files.  Then imported them into TGTP.

Though there are no texture maps (yet), the results came out nicely.   And it was really easy to make (though the original .obj file was over 500 MB!).

[glen5700]

I agree that City Engine looks the best, hope it does make it's way down to us little guy's but ILM or something of that category will probably get there hands on it.

As far as the XSI plugin goes you can get the full working version of XSI 6 Foundation for 30 days. I believe there are no limitations on the software, it would give you a chance to get some obj's out of it.

http://www.softimage.com/downloads/XSI_Trial/default.aspx

Glen