Gta/WatchDogs/Yakuza ect, city design thread

snake85027

For a very long time Ive always wanted to make a small shadowrun style city in the spirit of a gta/watch dogs and all those great open world games but I always get stuck on roads and side walks and layout and would like to start a thread on general advice and how these companies create their cities. Whats the thought process. Are the roads using some kind of spline system or is it just methodically planned out with modular pieces and how do those piece work with the side walks as well and what if you have different elevations in the terrain as well as unique buildings that dont have the typical square shapes to them. Alot of downtown roads will have one ways that eventually lead to 2 way systems that will eventually branch out to 3-4 lane streets ect.Also how are materials done for these roads to break up the tiling, do they use a lot of decals or is there just a lot of verts in the models and they use vertex blending. Well it would be nice to have a Thread thats pinned for this particular topic. I love just love how roads are done in these games, they feel very organic.

Eric Chadwick

Do some searches. Open world art systems have been explained in presentations at various game developer conferences.

Also check our wiki.

Also, use paragraphs.

Also, thread title would be better as a question. This is not a "thread" until it has actual info in it. Right now it's just a question.

snake85027

Thanks, Ill check the wiki out.

musashidan

Fallout 4 team did a good talk on how they planned and built Boston. It's a gdc talk. Haven't time to link it here but you can  search YT or gdc vault.

snake85027

Thanks Musashidan, I saw that as well. I thought I saw a short piece that Rockstar had made showing how they did their roads for gta 5 or at least how easy it was adjusting their roads. I was looking at GTA3 and it looked like they just modeled their roads as one mesh? 

throttlekitty

GTA3 is older than dirt, I wouldn't put a whole lot of weight into doing hand modeled roads. Procedural solutions like this video allow a lot of freedom and mutability through the whole design process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtjBKq1qPOQ

snake85027

Hongkong kowloon, here is an inspiration that I like to recreate. A lot of these streets have so many different types of lanes and flow into each other that it seems difficult to recreate.

Eric Chadwick

That's do-able with a modular system + multi-texturing + a few unique pieces. You just have to break it down into layers.

snake85027

Maybe I should make put this in a different section in the forums? I went and took a screenshot of some streets in hongkong and then put water around it to close it off. Just to give me something to start with.