CityBuilder CityBuilder - Automate much of the work involved in creating very large virtual urban landscapes
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city build city builder create urban landscape urban landscape designer urban landscape

CityBuilder Description

CityBuilder - Automate much of the work involved in creating very large virtual urban landscapes CityBuilder is an attempt to automate much of the work involved in creating very large virtual urban landscapes. The system takes a street map as input, and produces street geometry and a scene graph containing the building models as output. The user has control over the types of buildings placed in the city through the use of image maps. The potential applications for this system include video game content (think GTA*), visualization, etc.It is well known to most of those in the field of computer graphics that mountainous terrain can be generated programmatically. A good deal of research has been done in this area, focused for the most part on the use of fractals to generate landscapes. While these techniques produce some impressive results, they are restricted in the kinds of terrain that they can generate. For example, these techniques are not appropriate for the creation of urban terrain.This is unfortunate, as there are many benefits to being able to programmatically generate urban landscapes. Many recent video games, for example, feature very large urban environments. With the CityBuilder system, there are three stages in the creation of a city. The first stage is where one creates the building models, the street map, and some miscellaneous support files used by the second stage.The second stage is where CityBuilder takes control. Street geometry is created using the StreetBuilder component, building models are placed in the city by the BlockBuilder component, and miscellaneous items like traffic lights are placed in the city by the ClutterBuilder component. The third stage is to fine-tune the output using a scene-graph editor or by hand-editing the output files. The city is then ready to be viewed. One possible use would be rapid prototyping for game engine testing. It may or may not surprise you to know that game engines, such as that used by GTA3, are developed simultaneously as the content for the game is being developed. CityBuilder-generated cities can provide game programmers with a useful test-bed for testing the engine while it is under development, and the primary game content is unavailable. A "stand-in" of sorts.Don't let this discourage you, though. You can, of course, produce much higher quality cities than the demo city that I've put together for this system. It all depends on how much time you're willing to put into it. And, since it's open-source, you can make improvements to any of the components of CityBuilder. Want curved sidewalk corners, just like GTA3's? Modify Streetbuilder.

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