City Creation Tools
Lets take a look at two city generating tools, ghostTown and CityEngine
Lets start off with CItyEngine,
If you watch the video on their site its pretty amazing.
- Point click streets.
- Feed it a map and out pops a city.
- Define building age by typing in a date.
- Drag a street corner around and everything adjusts in real time as you drag.
All pretty amazing features and considering the ease of use, its really tempting to use for a lot of things. However the price might send most people into sticker shock so lets take a look at another tool for 3dsmax that's being developed, ghostTown.
Keep in mind this is beta software and could be a bit buggy, but after a few min messing around with it, I really really like it and the only bug I encountered was when I created something really really big, and it probably would of pulled through ok but I pulled the plug instead of waiting.
Lets go over its features.
- Quickly layout city blocks using basic splines or flat edit poly shapes.
- Manages color pallets and materials.
- Stores custom building facade and roof objects for quick population of buildings.
- Smart street layout using splines.
Here just watch this...
You'll need to register in the forums to see the post that features the download link, at least its free and no longer under license, so be thankful...
It's a little light on documentation so I'll share some pointers:
Once you get it downloaded, install it by going to the max main menu > MaxScript > Run Script and point it to the .mzp file you downloaded. After that follow the instructions to get it up and running.
Mini-Tutorial:
- Once you have it installed. Layout some simple spline shapes, keeping in mind that this is a city your creating and scale does matter.
- Click setup, (it will complain if you built things too small, its better to start over at a bigger scale rather than scale it bigger) it will convert the shapes over to a single edit poly,
- Use the quick slice tool to define a street or two, then click setup again and it will auto generate a few city blocks.
- Then you're free to click build and it will block in the buildings.
- From there you can select roof tops and populate them or you can click the building facades and detail and texture them,
There are a lot more features but that should get you started.
Replies
is that for gaming to................
Finally a free tool I really needed. Great!