First City Engine Render

[cyphyr]

No artistic merit at all but I thought I would post this as a taste of things to come. City modelled and exported from City Engine, no effort or time taken I just loaded the default scene, selected everything and exported the lot!
Not bad for about 2 min work
Cheers
Richard

[Zairyn Arsyn]

looks good to me so far, doesn't need to be artistic, if its a taste of things to come.
the new wireframe feature goes a long way for this sort of scene.

i'm buying myself a i7 machine as a sort-of birthday present, i think after that i'm going to get the indie version of city engine, after i try the trial.
which version did you purchase?

[Dune]

Bloody hell, that's awfully nice already!

[FrankB]

great stuff Richard!

If only City Engine's pricing wouldn't be so steep

... but this struck me in the heart: http://www.cornucopia3d.com/brokeredfor.php?artist_store=137

City Engine for Vue (inside Vue even) for $299 ! Dammit. I want that for TG2 as well!
Oshyan, please talk to these guys :-)

Cheers,
Frank

[goldfarb]

I've mentioned this before but it's worth doing again...

these kinds of procedural cities can be made in Houdini (apprentice version is free) - a bit more work but the results are as good.

[Henry Blewer]

This certainly blows away the Blender city generator.  Looks very good, with a little work on the landscape this would cause some people to take a real interest how it was done.

[otakar]

Nice! Question: How big is the object file? Are the textures high res? Just wondering if TG can handle a city like this on a modest machine...

[Walli]

nice result and actually the pricing is not that steep in my opinion. Of course it sounds steep compared to pricing of TG, but for most freelancers thats a bargain (the indie version). If you have to do a city, now you can save so much time...
As mentioned before, with some more work you can do stuff like that in Houdini too and I think the learning edition of Houdini is pretty cheap.

[Henry Blewer]

I downloaded the free version of Houdini. It does not like my computer very much,too slow. After it figures out the machine, it seems to work well. I think the HD version is $99.00. Gets rid of the watermark, higher render resolution...

[Zairyn Arsyn]

hey cyphyr, i are you going to try making a city with a heightfield terrain? i'm wondering how that will turn out, or how easy it would be.

[Tangled-Universe]

hey cyphyr, i are you going to try making a city with a heightfield terrain? i'm wondering how that will turn out, or how easy it would be.

I was just about to ask the same question It would be cool to have houses on hills etc.

[cyphyr]

Thanks for the buzz guys
This really was just to see if the package worked, and yes it indeed do
I will be making some cities that conform to landscape topography, the process looks not too difficult, height maps etc are just grey scale images.
The model above came in at 20Mb with 40+ ! texture layers but the images are in the 200kb to 500kb range. It did need to be baked out through Poseray as the mtl file was read incorrectly by Terragen. I think Terragen could well handle MUCH bigger models stretching way off into the distance.
I will be returning to CityEngine once I have some time, over Christmas or once my current work has finished.
I took a look at the Houdini and the Blender versions of city building plugins and although each is ok they're not a patch on CityEngine.
Cheers
Richard

[FrankB]

so again - like Vue - can we have this for an extra $299 integrated with TG2 please?

[rcallicotte]

That has potential.

I agree with Frank.   

[cyphyr]

A few more samples ~ The Venice is from their online demo library ...

Richard