Outerra forum

Outerra Engine => Off Topic => Topic started by: nawrp11 on August 19, 2013, 02:01:42 am

Title: good city generators?
Post by: nawrp11 on August 19, 2013, 02:01:42 am

Hey guys. I just wanted to know if any of you would know something about this. Do you guys know of any good city generators that can render a city?
thanks

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: krz9000 on August 19, 2013, 05:02:41 am

"cityengine" is nice and they offer a trial version. its a tool to generate the city...it has no abilities to render them nicely. you need another program to do that.
http://www.esri.com/apps/products/cityengine2/index.cfm (http://www.esri.com/apps/products/cityengine2/index.cfm)

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: aWac9 on September 04, 2013, 09:43:31 am

very strong

also ArcGis
http://youtu.be/EQi07TTXeyY (http://youtu.be/EQi07TTXeyY)

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: WormSlayer on September 05, 2013, 10:36:06 am

I've not used ArcGIS, but can confirm that CityEngine is pretty awesome, Rockstar use it to generate the GTA cities.

The tricky bit is getting a heightmap of the area from outerra, into cityengine...

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: foxfiles on September 05, 2013, 11:26:49 am

I had seen CityEngine when it was developped by a Swiss company years ago; then ESRI bought them
How much does one advanced license cost ?
How is LOD managed with their datas ?

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: foxfiles on September 05, 2013, 11:38:03 am

I myself answer to the above question about LODs.  ;D
They do that inside their appli, in coding with attribut and case statements...
see here
http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/63819-Level-of-Detail-%28LOD%29?highlight=LOD (http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/63819-Level-of-Detail-%28LOD%29?highlight=LOD)

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: WormSlayer on September 05, 2013, 11:40:43 am

It's about $4k a user XD
It uses a scripting language to determine how the building models are generated, so you can also pretty easily have it generate LOD models at the same time.

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: krz9000 on September 05, 2013, 07:37:11 pm

Most of the rulesets that come with the tool have 2 lods. I export these to Maya and set my render szene up there usually. (I have a license from office that has the fbx exporter). U can also link in your own objs and have them scattered. City engine does lots of things right. It could be a good blueprint for something similar in outerra

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: WormSlayer on September 05, 2013, 07:43:57 pm

I guess if we are talking about procedural city generation, it's obligatory to link the Subversion demo XD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR9xI0GgrBY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR9xI0GgrBY)

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: foxfiles on September 06, 2013, 05:34:26 am

Thanks for sharing these infos.
How many levels of detail can OT deal with so far?
I remember having read somewhere about 6 levels for imported models (importer thread?) - is it still true ?

So if you want to provide 6 LODs for real-time rendering in OT (if we forget an eventual procedural capability for model gen...)
it means that the process should be :
- model in CityEngine or in any other modeller
- then export the datas (meshes and textures) to FBX or another format
- import these in a tool able to work on the LODs
- then re-export for OT

I must admit that I don't know how LODs are practically managed in tools like 3Ds, Maya and others, so my questions...
 

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: ZeosPantera on September 06, 2013, 08:18:40 am

I think it is actually more like 14 LOD levels.. But nothing is using that now.

Title: Re: good city generators?
Post by: foxfiles on September 06, 2013, 09:50:38 am

14 levels  :P