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Author Topic: good city generators?  (Read 11043 times)

nawrp11

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good city generators?
« 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
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krz9000

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #1 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
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aWac9

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #2 on: September 04, 2013, 09:43:31 am »

very strong

also ArcGis
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WormSlayer

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #3 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...
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foxfiles

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #4 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 ?
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Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one - A. Einstein

foxfiles

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #5 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
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WormSlayer

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #6 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.
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krz9000

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #7 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
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WormSlayer

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #8 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

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foxfiles

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #9 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...
 
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ZeosPantera

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #10 on: September 06, 2013, 08:18:40 am »

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

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Re: good city generators?
« Reply #11 on: September 06, 2013, 09:50:38 am »

14 levels  :P   
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