Now, about the city...
First,
Here is the scene, objects, and maps. With it you can play your own Simcity game.
So, therhat's the city itself (I will tell you later how it was generated). There are three materials for this object: One for buildings, one for city soil, one for soil with some vegetation. Last element is a water plane (channel). And I used some imagemaps to do some masking. Nothing special about light, atmosphere, or anything else. Just look at the scene to see how it's done.
To generate the city I've used a little program I've did myself, with
Processing.
Be aware that was one of my first programs. So, it's not a very elaborate thing, or a clever thing. No comment in the code, no *@#$! manual, but I think it's relatively simple. It's a loop. It's drawing 400 "blocs", in each "bloc" there is a "building", the shape of the "building" is random (66 types of buildings). When the 400 blocs are drawed... It start again, and again, and again (and again).
There is no interface, or elaborate function. If you want to change some parameter you must edit the code. The only thing you can do is to press the
R key of your keyboard. When R key is pressed: the city is saved in DXF format (no incremential function, if you want to save several cities, you must rename the files). You can find the last version
here. There are the sources, a Linux version, a Mac version, and a Windows version. Fell free to use, modify, and do whatever you want with it (improve it would be a good idea).
/!\ Warning: executable versions were never tested! You use it at your own risks. /!\Now, if you have tested the thing, and exported some DXF city, you'll see it's crap. If you want to use it in TG2 there's a lot of work to do.
What I do step by step: Import a DXF city in 3dsmax (it can take some time). Import an other (superposed buildings are nicer, more complex). Put on them a double sided surface (because some faces are drawn the wrong way). Ok, now you see better. Reunite the two meshes. Edit it (you can clean some blocs to make green spaces, or change height, build a channel, modify the streets, you can also unify the faces normals, etc.).
When it's done, you must define your materials. So, I apply a Multi/Sub-object material with (for exemple) 3 "sub material" (one for buildings, one for soil, one for green spaces). After that, I edit the material ids of the faces of my city mesh (id 1 for building, id 2 fot soil, id 3 for green spaces). Last thing to do with 3dsmax: Export the thing in 3DS format. I'm sure you can do all that with an other program (better than 3dsmax5).
Now, we must convert the file in OBJ format. To do that, I import the 3DS file in PoseRay, and export it directly in OBJ format. you can now use it in TG2.
Enjoy!
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