CityEngine: The City Builder
Procedural modeling of cities.
Modeling a city poses a number of problems to computer graphics. Every urban area has a transportation network that follows population and environmental influences, and often a superimposed pattern plan. The buildings appearances follow historical, aesthetic and statutory rules. To create a virtual city, a roadmap has to be designed and a large number of buildings need to be generated. We propose a system using a procedural approach based on L-systems to model cities. From various image maps given as input, such as land-water boundaries and population density, our system generates a system of highways and streets, divides the land into lots, and creates the appropriate geometry for the buildings on the respective allotments. For the creation of a city street map, L-systems have been extended with methods that allow the consideration of global goals and local constraints and reduce the complexity of the production rules. An L-system that generates geometry and a texturing system based on texture elements and procedural methods compose the buildings.
July 13th, 2005 at 11:19 am
More info about the CityEngine can be found here:
http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/%7Epmueller/wiki/pmwiki.php/CityEngine/Front
July 13th, 2005 at 11:27 am
Dear Pascal,
great suggestion!
Thanks very much.
Massimo.