I Build Cities For Fun & Profit

Procedural Generation Of Cityscapes

 City created in 3DS Max Using Ghosttown 

For those of you who follow me you know that I work at a studio called Digital Sunrise. Digital Sunrise is primarily concerned with architectural and environmental art. This artwork is for either architectural firms or for the digital sets that are used in games and TV/film. 

Very often we are contracted to produce a specific building with the addition of putting it inside a virtual city. To do this we use a variety of tools. To Accomplish this, we use two main tools. The first one is  ESRI CityEngine. CityEngine is a very powerful tool for creating large cityscapes based on things like GIS data which can provide several important pieces of information such as the configuration of the streets and my also help to define the foot print of the buildings. From there a sort of script is written to build the structures and buildings. CityEngine can build very large cities in a short amount of time. I find that it can get cumbersome to program the rules for the scripts but when you are done it can be worth the work.  The other tool that we use is an add on for 3DS Max from Autodesk. It is called Ghosttown.

Futuristic Cityscape Created CityEngine

For small to medium sized cities I much prefer to use Ghosttown. It has a better interface for building facades and you have to edit a whole lot less scripts. To begin developing you need to create a base piece of geometry for the plug in to work on. Usually we build several blocks worth of buildings at a time and repeat those blocks many times to cut down on the amount of memory that is used. Also a lot of the time we need to render the blocks in After Effects and that limits our budget for the amount of geometry in the scene as well as the materials used due to limited memory on the graphics card. While very often a rectangle or square is used to be the base for the buildings, roads, etc, you can use just about any faceted geometry. There is a certain amount of minimum space that is required on any given face. So a sphere will not work. 

CityEngine

From there you decide how many lanes you want in your roads and the approximate maximum size of things like the lots. You then specify how probable it will be for a building to be on any given lot and the offset from the lots. This defines the footprint of the buildings. 

Created with Ghosttown

The image above was one of our early experiments with the Ghosttown plugin for 3DS Max. It was eventually imported into Lumion 3D.  We use programs like Lumion because it is a faster way to render these scenes. Depending on the quality of the rendering required we use Lumion, Max, or Element 3D to do our rendering. 

Ghosttown

Ghosttown

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