Just a city Demo using Mr_Lamppost's new population masking technique link (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3751.0) to stop the buildings overlapping. Works fairly well and I'm sure a method could be devised to include image maps to masks out larder irregular park/river areas as well.
I would pursue this one further but once I activated a reflective glass texture for the windows the render times ground to a halt. Also I noticed that the reflections were not working properly, not reflecting everything or the reflections coming in the wrong place. I think I'll wait till the next update and try again.
Anyway a useful technique, thank you very much Mr lamppost :)
Richard
Cool. Looks great.
Ahhh, cyphyr, you're giving me ideas. Heehee. ;D
Thats a pretty cool idea you've got there, its too bad we're limited to so few textures though, this could be really good.
Someone (I think gregsandor) said something about using just one texture map per model as opposed to having all of the variations (like in Poser). This freed up a lot of room for more textures.
Quote from: NWsenior07 on April 10, 2008, 02:13:20 PM
Thats a pretty cool idea you've got there, its too bad we're limited to so few textures though, this could be really good.
The texture limit has never been an issue really. Each building "could" be made with just the one texture but three or four would be more realistic. One for the walls, one for the windows and two more for various extra details. I'm trying to find a way of adding a variety of signage without having too much repeat going on but here I think I may have to bite the bullet and just model huge street level signs and be done with it. The only real hold up now (err ... I think) is getting the glass to look right.
Richard
Very nice demo.
Are the buildings imported, or procedural?
That looks good.
Something that would help and another minor enhancement to the population generator would be an optional "Step size" under the rotation controls so that you could limit the way random rotations are applied. Something like; Min Rotation = 0, Max Rotation = 360, Step size = 90. The way I am seeing this work is that with these settings you would get buildings rotated either 0 or 90 or 180 or 270. Add that to the ability to populate on points in a proper array. ;D ;)
A little scrutiny answered my question; but I have seen some theoretical stuff about generating procedural cities where no models would be required.
I assume the math would be pretty hellish, but its an intriguing idea.
I'd love to even try to put together -one- procedural structure that would have a decent level of detail, you know, not just punched holes for windows but the window sill and all that.
But then, that's why places like Pixar and R&H have entire departments of shader-writers.
Cool I like it.
Sorry I haven't been able to respond earlier but here goes. No the city blocks are not procedural, there have been a number of attempts at procedural city building but nothing particularly good available yet. You basically have to bite the bullet and model, at the very least, each building individually. In the above image there are 5 separate buildings. Where TG comes into its own is in the distribution of these buildings. I don't know of any other piece of software that can do this as easily. I really like the idea of "Stepped" and indeed I can see little point in having a max and min rotational setting without the option of limiting the rotations to a user defined step.
Richard
That's where I thought it would be a real personal challenge - to make an entirely parametric building, and avoid having to bite that modeling bullet.
It would be a serious undertaking, but I think it is doable. Probably not by me though!
I have a very vague recollection of a guy on the Houdini forum who alluded to having done this. Could be my defective memory acting up again though.