CityEngine, a procedural city building program has just debuted with a free (unrestricted I think for non commercial uses) demo available on 26th May.
Link HERE (http://www.procedural.com/)
Richard
Cool! Thanks for the link. Going on my to-do list. ;D
This looks very interesting. Thanks for the link.
I can see many opportunitys with this and Terragen 2. I have already many ideas :)
Cool tool
I love the randomness.. would be a cool tool!
im buyin that for sure ;D
Veeery cool. I think I remember seeing this in an earlier research phase and I'm glad to see it's actually going to be made public. All we need now is a *plugin* for TG2 so you don't have to deal with exporting tons of geometry (and hoping the UV's match up). ;D
- Oshyan
On the developers old site (you'll have to google for it, lost the link) there were some downloadable models of Pompeii (I think). Pretty large file sizes for whole cities (60mb+) but nothing beyond TG's abilities. The only problem is that the obj's come down with point data only, ie. points no polygons. Anybody know how to convert them to polygons?
Richard
I took a look at those Pompeii obj's. They came in fine with polys intact. But they certainly were huge and tested the machine to its limits. There seemed to be too many chimneys, though.
the moon obj I used a while back (and some times today) was around 800mbs so TG can handle it.
any idea on pricing yet?
Quote from: Will on May 11, 2008, 07:44:27 AM
any idea on pricing yet?
I don't think we'll find out until the 23rd (I think that's the correct date).
heres the link to the free models!
http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/DownloadModels (http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/DownloadModels)
I want. The free trial is music to my poor ears. ;D
This looks like a brilliant piece of software, an awesome addition to the toolbox... but I wonder about that mysterious price. Hope they're not thinking along the lines of Massive when they decide their pricing structure!
I'm *really* looking forward to being able to use this. I only hope that either a) it gets ported to OS X or b) I can run it on my Linux VM.
looks great!
Me too
Will looks great ;D
As true as that is I was responding to O_B
I was assumin that. I just had to. A silly little joke from me ::)
Oh I'm the last person who could protest.
city engine will be $7000!!!
Are you joking, or is this for real? That would price it far and away above anyone who isn't a studio or Rhythm & Hues sized outfit. Would be a real shame, as few users would ever get any time on it.....
Quote from: lightning on May 15, 2008, 12:22:43 AM
city engine will be $7000!!!
That's actually a very reasonable price considering what it does. It certainly doesn't put it in the ILM's only bracket, and could easily be justified to a production when compared to the cost of building cities the usual way (probably 5 to 10 times that, if not more). It's man hours that are the biggest overhead and this takes them down to one bod's worth plus perhaps a wiggeter (adding detail). But yes, it does take it out of the unpaid market, unless they offer a 'City Engine Lite' at some point (perhaps with limited poly counts and features - you never know). Fingers crossed.
Quote from: lightning on May 15, 2008, 12:22:43 AMcity engine will be $7000!!!
Where did you find this? I can't find it anywhere.
I was really looking forward too this, but for $7000 I think I'll just buy 3ds max and some cool plugins for it.
Quote from: lightning on May 15, 2008, 12:22:43 AM
city engine will be $7000!!!
*open the window and jump*
$7000 ?! OUCH !
Quote from: sjefen on May 15, 2008, 07:00:53 AM
Quote from: lightning on May 15, 2008, 12:22:43 AMcity engine will be $7000!!!
Where did you find this? I can't find it anywhere.
I was really looking forward too this, but for $7000 I think I'll just buy 3ds max and some cool plugins for it.
i emailed the company
That's a damn shame; going to price it far and away out of the hands of 99% of the people out there... oh well. I was hoping for something like RealFlow - a big sting, but still attainable.
Quote from: lightning on May 16, 2008, 03:13:14 AM
Quote from: sjefen on May 15, 2008, 07:00:53 AM
Quote from: lightning on May 15, 2008, 12:22:43 AMcity engine will be $7000!!!
Where did you find this? I can't find it anywhere.
I was really looking forward too this, but for $7000 I think I'll just buy 3ds max and some cool plugins for it.
i emailed the company
hopefully there will be a educational edition
Quote from their web site:
"A fully functional trial version of the CityEngine software for non-commercial use will also be available for download on May 23th."
Now the question is just exactly what is meant by "fully functional trial version".
Richard
Quote from: cyphyr on May 16, 2008, 07:12:49 AM
Quote from their web site:
"A fully functional trial version of the CityEngine software for non-commercial use will also be available for download on May 23th."
Now the question is just exactly what is meant by "fully functional trial version".
Richard
I don't want a trail version. I would only use that to test if I could handle it, but for
7000 it's almost not even worth trying. 700$ would be ok.
in an ideal world (yeah right whatever lol) a "fully functional trial version" should be identical to the licensed except that your not allowed to use it commercially. So as long as you don't make any money from it directly you should be OK. I would assume that if you make an image with it that you then sell or is part of a commission you've won then you would need the licensed version. We'll just have top wait and see wqhat their understanding is.
Richard
That's why I would like to buy it. Cause maybe one day I make something that I would like to try and sell.
Quote from: Will on May 16, 2008, 06:09:09 AM
hopefully there will be a educational edition
Yeah, so that we students only have to pay $500, which is obviously in our price ranges ::).
o_b - LOL
I know it's tough. Decisions, decisions.
There's some rotoscoper prog out there that costs something like $10000; made by an outfit called Imagineer, and all their apps are so overpriced, its almost like some kind of running company joke.
Periodically they have 90% off sales. I suspect its the only time they ever sell any product.
Someone has their head stuck back in the '90's when apps like Prisms cost $60,000 and people actually paid that.
I'm not saying that City Engine shouldn't be charging that based on their R&D and what the app is capable of, I'm just saying that a $7k price tag will put it well outside the hands of most artists and small shops, which is a real shame.
there will be no educational edition Pascal who is the CEO of Procedural Inc told me that they do not have the resources or support to do it
then they will have trouble marketing it
Quote from: lightning on May 16, 2008, 08:01:29 PM
there will be no educational edition Pascal who is the CEO of Procedural Inc told me that they do not have the resources or support to do it
So has Pascal given you any indication of what the limitations of the demo will be?
Richard
Perhaps we could make a collective plead with the company to rethink that to something more along the lines of Real Flow's $3500. Personally, I think they'd sell way more that way... but realistically I'm sure these decisions are pretty well made at this point.
Many companies have a policy of providing much less (or no) support to educational and other non-professional versions. I don't see that resources and support should be that big a problem. But it's their decision to make. Still I think they would get more than 10 times the number of customers if they reduced the price by 10x (e.g. $700 instead of $7000), so their net income would be the same or greater (I would say probably much greater!). This results in an increased support load, but that doesn't necessarily increase linearly with the number of registered users. In fact a smaller number of users paying a large amount will expect much better support than 10 times the number of users at a lesser price would.
- Oshyan
i think this price is gonna force people to download it illegally... :(
i hope the free version announced will be good :)
some videos on their blog too : http://blog.procedural.com/
Interesting discussions going on here ;-)
Yes, the price was a hard but well-thought-out decision. As mentioned by JimB, it is mainly reasoned by the person-months you will save (and we positioned it in the price range of Maya, RenderMan etc). However, we will offer educational pricing for universities, but not (yet) student versions.
See it from the positive side: it does not cost $20K like other superb high-end software such as Massive (which actually is less unique than our app ;-)
Stay tuned on our website...
Regards,
Pascal
Quote from: pascalmueller on May 18, 2008, 06:44:48 PM
Yes, the price was a hard but well-thought-out decision. As mentioned by JimB, it is mainly reasoned by the person-months you will save (and we positioned it in the price range of Maya, RenderMan etc). However, we will offer educational pricing for universities, but not (yet) student versions.
See it from the positive side: it does not cost $20K like other superb high-end software such as Massive (which actually is less unique than our app ;-)
I just hope you consider the hobbyist/independent artist market at some point in the future. Anyway, the software looks brilliant and I wish you great success.
Hello Pascal and welcome! It's always good to see software developers being involved with their broader communities. :)
In regards to pricing, I think the key is not "how much money will you potentially save" but "how much will the market bear". Obviously the two have a close relationship in theory, but they are not quite the same. ;)
Also it's important to note, although your product is in the price range of Maya, it is a much, much narrower problem domain in which it specializes, so it's rather hard to say pricing it similar to Maya is appopriate simply because it is a similarly high-end product. Maya is expensive but it covers so much of a typical production house's overall needs (modeling, animation, even potentially rendering) that it easily justifies that price.
As for Massive, yes it's also very costly, and I think your product is at least as interesting and complex to implement (as you say, likely more so). At the same time I think the things Massive does are more in-demand problems to be solved and more difficult to solve satisfactorily otherwise, without significant effort; for cities you can use tile-based geometry or very simple uniquely modelled geometry with higher resolution textures and most audiences will not notice or care, but repetetive character interactions on a large scale are I think more readily noticed and glaring to audiences. And in cases where city detail really is key, often times a real city will need to be modelled and portrayed realistically anyway, in which case I'm not sure your tool is as much use since it is procedural and will take additional work to mimick real buildings anyway.
All that being said I respect your pricing decision and I wish you great success. It's clear you've put a lot of time, effort, creativity, and intelligence into the product and it is very cool. Great work. :)
- Oshyan
I understand it will save a lot of time for many things and for many projects, but I still think the price is a little to stiff.
I think Oshyan has a great point here. With Maya you can create anything you could think of, animate it and render it.
The same goes for 3ds max (which i think you could get for about $3500). Both of these software's has mental ray integrated.
Sure it would take a lot of time to create a city with these two, but it's possible and you can create them exactly as you imagine them.
I'll be sure to check ot the trial version, but personaly.... $7000 is way too much for me and I belive it is for many, many others too.
For $700 I would have bought it and I also belive many, many others would have too.
Don't get me wrong. CityEngine looks like a awesome tool, but you can't create anything with it. It's meant for making buildings and city's.
I think the main issue here is that City Engine is primarily positioned towards game developers rather than artists like ourselves. Its actually something of a coincidence that it is exactly the sort of tool that we could use in our renders. I know less than nothing about game development but it comes to mind that for a city model to be used sensibly in a game it will need some serious LOD (Level of Detail) optimization to the game engine itself. I assume that this LOD optimization is an included module in CityEngine. This is not something that would be very useful to us but, (clutching at straws) would it not be possible to make two versions of city engine, one for game dev's and one for artists with the LOD optimization removed. You could then sell two versions to a MUCH wider audience at different (hopefully lower) prices. Anyway still looking forward to the demo, hopefully I'll be able to export some city "bits" that I can make a bigger one out off.
Richard
Ah, you know, I hadn't even considered the game dev angle, and you're right it's likely to be a lot more useful there. I suppose the price is more easily justified for level building purposes, just like any high-end procedural art tool; they tend to be much more in-demand in game development I think.
- Oshyan
So the trail version is supposed to be available today :)
yeah there abit late about the release date they said the 23rd i think.
its the 27th down here ;D
While a city cab be made in Maya, XSI, et al, you need to bear in mind the practicalities of actually doing it. Remember that WETA had to write their own equivalent to City Engine to create New York for the latest King Kong, and WETA has a lot of resources.
Any news on CityEngine?
I have been interested in this for a while buy their site has been down for ages.
Quote from: Muied Lumens on June 22, 2008, 09:30:43 PM
Any news on CityEngine?
I have been interested in this for a while buy their site has been down for ages.
agree its been a month since they said they would release it ::)
Perhaps they are considering our points.... what, it could happen...
Quote from: Will on June 23, 2008, 04:06:45 PM
Perhaps they are considering our points.... what, it could happen...
That would be cool, but I doubt it. Take a look at the first movie on this site (CityEngine Preview)
and listen to what he says in the end: http://www.procedural.com/cityengine/movies.html (http://www.procedural.com/cityengine/movies.html)
We can do a simple version of city generation with TG if it was possible to export an entire population. I've masked city blocks, set up populations, and created vast cities from accurate models. All that remains to use it outside of TG is an exporter.
Sorry even 700 is absolutely ridiculous in my eyes. 7000 is a disgrace :D
Quote from: Xpleet on June 26, 2008, 01:06:46 PM
Sorry even 700 is absolutely ridiculous in my eyes. 7000 is a disgrace :D
If the product is aimed to the game developer community, remember that these people are accustomed to development teams of 10/20/30 people with development time 2+ years. This means that their budget is appropriate for a few tens to a few hundreds (!) man years effort (which equates to some 1-5 million dollars); spending a few tens of thousands of dollars to speed up development (even by just one month) is a no-brainer.
Bye!!!
tis looks pretty cool. if there is a free demo, I will certainly be downloading it.
Indeed, this can make things in the games industry much, much easier. Even if the city layout is only used as a vista model (something used in the distance, normally just a billboard or, in some cases, a sprite) or as the model for the area surrounding one that's playable... this'll make things a whole hell of a lot better.
As for the pricing... as an independant artist that's paying for my programs, $7000.00 is understandable, but hella high. As the guy who'd have to build that same damn city, and many others over and over again during my time in the industry, they could reasonably charge more. Taking into consideration the time (which is money, remember!) saved on a single city alone (depending on the size) would make the product at least well worth it. And multiplying that same time over x amount of cities, it's probably paying for itself very quickly.
It might have been my sheer amazement of the Endorphin toolset only being ~$1500.00 that made me assume this would have been less, but I really do hope they release a second SKU for us artists.
Hey All,
I just had to sign up here because I am working on a city generator of my own and have been for six months now, I will be opening an official website in a week with previews and screenshots and there should be a fully working trial within 1-2 months max.
Having found the CityEngine trial url at procedural.com, it's not exactly hidden, but not official yet, I can safely say CityEngine is missing many features I have underway, and in comparison seems like it is lacking a heck of a lot for the price, and anyone who pays $7,000 for it deserves the disappointment they will feel when they see mine.
Not that I think there is much risk of many people here buying CityEngine because they have made it impossible for the people that actually need it to afford while hailing it as something revolutionary in 3D Generation of which there is no competition, for a short time anyway.
I am implementing every feature of the CityEngine and more.
My city engine is being developed by myself for a Game I am working on and I see no reason not to commercialize it since I have over 50 Indie developers constantly asking me about it's progress and how much I will sell them it for.
$7,000 is a lot of money to a small studio, and to an indie developer/Student it is a complete write off, However to large Organizations in the Entertainment industry and others it is an affordable asset, a time and cost cutting tool which is why I believe CityEngine is so costly, because they want to make big money quickly from companies that will pay there price tag.
What I will be doing is offering a Student/Hobbyist, Indie and Commercial Licence.
What is a fair price to you all here for a Student (For non commercial use, use in non profit Films, Animations, Student Projects etc..), Indie (For small scale commercial Use, I.E, Games that make less than $5,000 net proffit), the commercial price i have already worked out by working with potential commercial customers.
I have a good idea, But would greatly appreciate your opinions before they are influenced by my planned price, so I can Lower them if needed.
Any feature requests are more than welcome.
crazycoder probably something under $1000 :-\
yeah guys if you want to download city engine trial go to this url
http://www.procedural.com/purchase/trial-download.html (http://www.procedural.com/purchase/trial-download.html)
Hey lightning,
Obviously I was thinking something under $1,000, most students and Indie developers I know would find anything above $500 to be out of there reach without saving up for a fair few months.
CityEngine seems to run very slow to me, Just rendering the Road Network of a few thousand roads seems to cause it speed problems showing only 4-6 FPS and 1 FPS with lots rendering and the RAM usage shoots up fast, My own road network generator gives me a clean 60 FPS while rendering a network of 10,000 roads, including rendering building lot's using the OGRE 3D rendering engine capped at 60FPS and the ram usage is at least 50% less.
For a piece of software that makes them $7 Million Dollars per 1000 copys I would think it would outperform mine.
I have a duel core AMD 4800+, 2 Gigs of Ram and an ATI X800 Pro (An aging card but for a few roads i would expect better).
Hows the speed for everyone else?
im still downloading ::)
Do you have a site or blog for your software and what is your software going to be called?
I wouldn't mind having a look at it
No site and no blog yet.
The game I am developing is a state of the art online game and is being developed in secret because I don't want the idea stealing, so I have kept it away from the public eye until near completion, and as such i have not blogged about my city generator either, I have ideas for a name but nothing decided yet.
My City Engine is born out of a developers need with no viable solution existing, CityEngine seemed to be the ideal bit of software, however the price and delay in release has only strengthened my desire to polish mine up and release it to the public for a fairer price.
I plan to have a site up within a week, I am currently re coding the facade generation class and polishing it up with a nice GUI, however if you like I will gather together some screenshots and post them here, I may even make a short video preview for you.
Quote from: crazycoder on July 16, 2008, 06:22:49 PM
...however if you like I will gather together some screenshots and post them here, I may even make a short video preview for you.
That would be great ;)
this would be awesome ;D
i would like to see some screenshots of your work ;)
so does your engine have all the capabilities of cityengine like Image-based Procedural Modeling of Facades
etc?
(http://www.procedural.com/typo3temp/pics/a08ba90b6b.png)
Image-based Procedural Modeling of Facades is just magical to me.
I have played with Image recognition for a long time but I do have to give Pascal credit, It's one heck of a magical thing when you compare the experience to building a 3D building model and then texturing it.
It not only lets you make a whole face of a building in no time at all, but it enables you to import some facade pictures or Textures from a place like texturama.com and then you have a large number of facades to which you can have a completely random building generated from.
The answer however is yes, though it did have me sweating to get it working 8)
I am currently polishing that up as we speak, so once finished I will post some screenshots, perhaps a video too.
Btw, I don't think that is in the City Engine demo, I couldn't find it.
no that demo sucks its realy hard to use and how the hell do you create single buildings from scratch all i can do is just create a basic cityscape withjust very basic polygons ::)
If you load in the sample scene, you can look at the basic building script, there are 2 skyscrapers I think, you can edit the tile width, spacing etc on the script, perhaps clone it and modify it for variation.
The idea I think is you manually code the Facade script that are used as a guideline for generating buildings,
Storing the information to reproduce a tile facade I.E a door or a window, the scripts are then used to divide a building into floors, facade tiles and the tiles are populated with the correct facade model faces & texture etc... Like cloning a Model of a window a few times in a row side by side, of course I suspect you could create the facades and building scripts with ease in the Image Based Facade Editor, if it where available and possibly generate a script.
In comparison to the way mine is shaping up I am beginning to question just why CityEngine seems to perform worse and why they did not either provide a large number of building scripts with the demo and just why there Image Based modeler is not included in the demo as without it you have to learn a modeling language and build your own Facet models to evaluate it properly.
Should have some screenshots when I have polished this Facet class up nicely.
This looks very interesting. I am a student/freelance artist, and so I would need a fairly cheap version for my use. I have just a few thoughts; I'm sure that you've thought of many or all of them already, but I just want to let you know what I would find most useful:
- First, I'm glad to see that there is some competition out there. CityGen looked good, but I personally thought that the high price was partially because it seemed to be the only product available. This will bring some good competition to the market.
- Second, good object export is a must. You need to be able to create very high quality objects from this to use in other applications. Tiled export would also be very helpful.
- Third, heightmap support. It would be my dream to be able to import a file (such as a Terragen terrain or even just a black and white image) that would guide the elevation of the buildings in the city. I could then import the city back into my program (I'm thinking Terragen specifically here) as an object that was matched perfectly to the terrain, and thereby get extremely refined and custom cities with very little effort.
- Fourth, Mac support. I'm on a Mac, and many visual effects artists and development studios use that platform too. I would seriously consider making a Mac port of your engine, assuming you haven't already.
Looking forward to further progress!
May I add a fifth? Once the TG2 SDK is available, make a plugin for TG2 so cities can be generated with dynamic detail in TG2 at render time, thus saving the high geometry count, overhead, and disk space of exported geometry. :)
- Oshyan
Speaking of the TG2 SDK. Add X-Frog, World Machine and GeoControl to the mix for Plugins. We need more shader and object control stuff to.
I have to agree. Maybe it was the lack of documentation that put me off of it... or maybe it was it constantly giving me errors when I tried to load anything from the example file they gave away. It could even have been it demanding a licence key this morning, after less than 24 hours of having the thing installed. But yeah... if I could break through the UI and figure out how to do all the cool things they've been pimping, I might like it more.
It's really lame that they don't even have a trial version forums area. I've got all these questions (since there's no doc) and nowhere really official to ask them.
Crazycoder, if you could deliver even half of the features Procedural is touting, I'd pay. I'm not sure how much - given the past day of CityEngine frustration, I can't really justify $7000.00 for it and therefore can't really come up with a reasonable value for what you're going to push.
I really look forward to what you're going to be doing... it'd be cool to have something like what Planetside's doing with TG2 and have a public-beta-thing, so we can get our hands dirty and appetites wet, and you get large-scale testing and... and... just lemme play with it! :P
anyone else tried it ?
i downloaded it but as i am rendering something since 75 hours, i can't test it... until my render is over...
ohoooh the forum is for paying customers only... the documentation too :-\
Thanks guys, all suggestions noted.
Yep, the CityEngine is aimed at high paying organizations if you ask me, and not just anyone or I probably wouldn't have to make my own.
As for the screenshots, the facet class I am working on is rather complex, and I am creating a visual editor for creation of building templates, to enable set rules/patterns for buildings to be created with a few clicks, rather than learning a scripting language, so it may be a couple of days before I get around to showing it off.
That and the GUI needs some work to make it more user friendly.
I am very excited about this :P
I almost can't wait, but I'd rather so what we get is useful.
Bring it on. ;D
Quote from: Oshyan on July 17, 2008, 01:34:50 AM
May I add a fifth? Once the TG2 SDK is available, make a plugin for TG2 so cities can be generated with dynamic detail in TG2 at render time, thus saving the high geometry count, overhead, and disk space of exported geometry. :)
- Oshyan
Indeed,
I am seriously recoding most of my app to prevent mine turning out like CityEngine, all hope and no delivery.
I really feel I have been sold a dream by Procedural Inc, one that simply wont come true even with $7,000 and a sweet quad core system, not that I have $7k.
Here are the 3 Machines I used to test CityEngine, including a Quad Core.
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 4800+
Ram: 2GB Ram
Gcard: ATI X800 Pro
OS: XP Pro SP3
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 4800+
Ram: 2GB Ram
Gcard: Nvidia 7800 GTX
OS: XP Pro SP3
CPU: intel q6600 quad
Ram: 2GB GEIL high latency ddr2800
Gcard: bfg oc2 8800gtx 712mb
OS: vista 32mb ultimate edition
All drivers up to date on all machines..
The quad core gave the most before the Low memory error, but a pitiful attempt at an urban city as you can see.
There all using the provided simpeBuilding.01.cga Rule.
I make you all this promise, I wont release mine with so much problems or lack of usability.
This is such a disappointment to me, I love reading Pascals papers, but the dream I have been sold by watching there flashy video's simply doesn't seem to be available yet, and I am questioning just what they did to make all the flashy video's on there site.
Quote from: crazycoder on July 18, 2008, 01:38:16 PM
...and I am questioning just what they did to make all the flashy video's on there site.
I heard in the early 90's a tale about GEC Marconi (an big avionics provider). The salespeople decided that a particular product would have sold well, so they created a WOOD mockup of the card, painted it, photographed it, created brochures and started goung around selling it. As soon as the orders started to get in, somebody went to engineering and told people there to start build the thing...
Never believe images (they can be the result of a good Photoshop professional) and be wary of videos (which are likely the capture of the execution of a special build which does only the thing you are shown). Believe only the program you are trying.
B.T.W., the demo is BOTH time-limited AND output-disabled. May be they went one step further and disabled also the execution ;D
Bye!!!
CityEngine is now available for purchase. I didn't understand much of the demo and it only last for 30 days.
Any news on you'r product crazycoder :P
- Terje
yes, I am not well atm so progress is being a bit slow :(
Working mainly on my shape grammar language atm, Kind of a silly idea to rewrite it to make it better and integrate a full visual editor thats taking a lot longer than I would like with me not being well.
As for the CityEngine, They told me if it's not in the demo it's not in it, you just get the export feature for your money, so I don't know what the heck happened to Image-Based Modeling or a visual building editor I was for some reason expecting inside the CityEngine, still, at least that gives me more extra features, hehe.
I totally forgot about this topic. I'm sorry to hear you are not well. Maybe it's a little late to say this now, or?
- Terje
Hmm :-\
So what's up with your product crazycoder?
Was this just a joke, or what?
- Terje