[CityGen] City generator
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@chris fullmer said:
But I don't want to get into designing urban design tools into the thing. Not at this point anyhow. Thats what modelur is for, right?
Chris
chris,
you and the others, as the authors of the soon-to-be great plugin, should be the ones to decide in which direction it goes. it is just that i have been craving for an easy and cheap urban design tool for long. modelur is still a WIP; it is not a full blown UD app yet.i can hardly wait what you guys will come up with.
regards.
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I think modelur will be released before this project will have its first release.
But feel free to express your ideas. One of the main things here is that due to modular design, things can be added by anyone. So if you describe your idea it could be picked up by someone that'd be interested in contributing.
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ok, its taken longer than expected (due to some modeling snafus on my part) but here is a quick mock up model that shows a possible workflow. It starts at the user drawing road cetnerlines (which really could also be automated) and continues on to a full built city using some of the idea's we've expressed here.
And even if I didn't specifically say it, everything in my mind is modular also. So the road creation is only one possible way to create roads. Same with the block subdividing, and the buildings. The buildings were made quickly using my greeble script. It would be more interesting to seem them with real textures on or made with real architectural detail to them. But that will come in time.
Chris
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Nice presentation Chris.
I've been wondering how you define what the colour coding means.
Take the street building module for instance:
Default colour, means default settings of your average street. (Some dialogue would be required to set this I guess.)
Custom colours define more specific types - let say we use red for main roads. Do we bring up a new dialog to define these, or can we provide the info in the material name?Example:
CG_Street_Main_W15000
CG -> [Constant] City Generator. Initial tag to mark a material as a CG material.
Street -> [Constant] Refer to the module, or type which it's used for.
Main -> [Variable] String identifying the type of street.
W15000 -> [Variable] W = Width - variable name. 15000 is the variable number.Is this a bit too technical? Would an average user find this an easy way to set up custom street types?
Or maybe it should have a dialoge to generate the appropriate material? It could still be a nice feature to keep the data in the material name instead of an attribute dictionary as it could easily be modified.
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@thomthom said:
Or maybe it should have a dialoge to generate the appropriate material? It could still be a nice feature to keep the data in the material name instead of an attribute dictionary as it could easily be modified.
I think it might be too technical to expect someone to be able to manually input that info into the material name. So a nice dialog would probably be beneficial. And it can name the material itself.
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I really wish there was an MaterialObserver event that returned the entity being painted...
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Its ok, we can do it without it. I'm a little scared of observers currently. Maybe I'll get over it, but I feel like they are so shaky....
I see it as a process like this:
Paint road centerlines
click "Generate Roads"Paint or auto-paint faces
click "Subdivide Land into Parcels"Click "Generate Buildings"
And done.
Each of those windows would have an available simple interface, or also an expoert mode with lots more bells and whistles.
So there's no need to watch what is being painted one at a time, you can jsut iterate through everything in the "generate" process.
Chris
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I think itd be a good idea to use the colour of the material as a visual indicators of the type of road/building, as well as the name of the material itself. I imagine a quick and dirty conversion from the street type/building height to a grayscale colour would do.
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@remus said:
I imagine a quick and dirty conversion from the street type/building height to a grayscale colour would do.
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I uploaded a first rough draft for the core: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=19492
And the Street Generator module: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=19493
I was thinking that we could continue the over all concept discussion here. And use the two other threads for specific development discussion.
I figured that unless we split the development discussion for each module the thread would become very confusing quickly. Feel free to suggest different organization. I just wanted to get something out there. -
Just feel free, Thom, to organise the discussion as you guys need. I see both Remus and Chris is in the "team" and since they are mods as well, they can easily move/split/merge topics/posts.
Once you get to a stage, we can even create a new/temporary subforum to collect all the discussions if really needed.
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this is already exciting as it is! best wishes for SG!
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Hi guys,
I see you have opened a very interesting topic here
I would love to actively participate in the development of application you are aiming to make, but my main priority is to develop Modelur further
We have quite some work to do before we reach the first full version... However, If I can help you out with something, please let me know!We don't have any plans to add procedural functionality any time soon, so the app you are planning, would go hand in hand with Modelur very well, as procedural approach can also be very useful in urban design to create simulations of city development.
I keep mi fingers crossed for CityGen!
Regards,
Jernej -
I'm very pleased to hear that you take interest in this. It's be very interesting if Modelur could be fit in somewhere. If you have some ideas that would make this project fit better with the workings or Modelur it'd be great to hear about it.
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That is very nice to hear indeed! I need to check out modelur and see exactly what it does and how it works. I'm more interested in proecdural city modeling than making an analysis tool. But It would be awesome if they worked together! So I'd like to be familiar enough with modelur so as to make sure we develop this in a way that it can play nicely with modelur. I think that only makes sense. Thanks for chiming in here Jernej!
Chris
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I remember that I read about a professional tool of this kind that is being used to recreate the Rome of A.D. 320
http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/ (version 2.0 of the model)
The tool is this:
Of course it's a very complex software (and commercial), not a ruby script, but I believe you may find it interesting.
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CityGen guys,
would CityGen be able to create streets and buildings over a hilly terrain? or would it be restricted to plane surfaces?
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For the moment id guess it will only work on a plane (thoms script only works on a plane, and the code i was messing about with at the beginning of this thread only works on a plane) as coding stuff to work on hilly terrain is exponentially more difficult. It is certainly something to look at in the future, though.
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@edson said:
CityGen guys,
Would CityGen be able to create streets and buildings over a hilly terrain? or would it be restricted to plane surfaces?
You could create the layout above the terrain and use the Sandbox tools to drape the streets ?
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