The starting point for all this work was an incredible paper written by Parish and Mueller, entitled "Procedural modelling of cities". We've been building a lot of extensions onto the basic system outlined in that paper and we're seeing some quite incredible results now. I love the detail in these shots, and I also know we're nowhere near done yet.
This is all a direct continuation from the original tech demos and previous blog entries, which go some way to explaining how the system works. If you compare these images to previous blog postings on the city generator, you'll see how far things have come along. We're dealing with cities with upwards of 30,000 buildings now.
Blog Part 6, 6 months ago
Blog Part 3, 11 months ago
At the moment the cities look great as long as you don't get too clos. The buildings are still generated as simple bounding boxes, meaning there is no variety. Down at the street level you're faced with rows and rows of blank buildings. The next major step is going to be generating more varied outer building shells, and starting to add in the sorts of details you'd expect to see at street level - windows, trees, pavements, doors etc.
I'm so in love with the procedural way of developing content at the moment. You can make a small change and see results in incredible detail immediately. Watching the entire process of city generation, it's amazing to think how much work has gone into each stage along the way. I've spent hours just clicking Generate, and seeing what pops out a minute later.
Here's a video showing the complete generation process for a 10Km city, from start to finish. Hope you like it.
Format : xvid (download codec here if required)
Resolution : 1280 x 800 x 10fps, 2 minutes
Filesize : 34Mb
(Top view and no controls)
And, like I said, the content is cool nonetheless.
I'll try downloading it again...but it cuts out after a few seconds. I've already downloaded it twice..