Posts Tagged ‘3d’

When I took this picture of buildings all jostling for space with each other on a Liverpool street I was going to just post it as a throw away picture post. However this was one of the views, with its variety of buildings from different eras, that inspired my render Accretion City. So I thought I might expand a little on the idea that pictures (especially 3D renders) need to be careful of avoiding mono culture scenery. I really like CityEngine (I think my reviews of CityEngine Indie and CityEngine Vue made that pretty obvious).

A lot of 3D scenes reveal their artificial nature because they use the same elements over and over again. I can’t remember which film it was but I do remember one of the 3D cartoons with insects films a few years ago where all the background insects looked the same. Every time I saw a group of ants in the background I knew I was watching a CG movie and it pulled me out of the story.  Vue users have become so used to EcoSystems they almost forget the power the variety gives in making scenes more believable through variation.

The sample scenes are great but they tend to create models of settlements that are very mono culture in nature. Even when they feature different types of area they tend to be of one era. CityEngines way of creating models of a city is great but they aren’t settlements that grow over time – and trying to making them do that is a task that would scare me and probably wouldn’t have huge benefits. So the trick will be to include a variety of building types to make it seem a model has grown over time. That will include creating models that fuse multiple styles so the old can be extended sometimes in a way that would have Prince Charles talking about carbuncles if these were real buildings.

Anyway somewhere along the lines before I’d finished writing what should have been a complete post I was struck by how I don’t just think this way for 3D stuff but also when I’m world building for stories or games. In fact I went as far as writing up a formalised way of doing that when I put together STEEPVM. Thats quite a formal method and I know that most of the time the ideas for a setting layer themselves by accretion until, hopefully, I have something believable.

Thankfully I don’t have to create some sort of procedural set of instructions for this to work. However I do have to be careful of the trap that lies in wait – a curate’s egg setting.

It is far too easy to be lured by lots of shinny, shinny ideas and to throw them all into a setting and be left with a mess. I hate to pick on one particular target but the RPG Waste World seemed to me to suffer baddly from this.  On the flip side I was really pleased when Nightfall Games posted on their new(ish) forums that they won’t be updating SLA’s technology because at the moment, for me, its achieved a level of accretion without tipping over into being a mess.

I was starting to write something about that when I remembered I’d written Leave out the (Steampunk) Kitchen Sink last year so I’ll not go back over that old ground again…

I reviewed CityEngine Indie last week, here is my review of CityEngine Vue.  If you read last weeks review I’ll not apologise for lifting large parts of it with only minor changes as there are only minor differences between the two products.  CityEngine Vue is exactly the same underlying software as all the other versions of CityEngine.   The only major difference is that CityEngine Vue is restricted to exporting Vue’s vob file format so you have to load the model into Vue.  All the other features are the same but you pay $196 less ($296 less if you’re a C.Club member at Cornucopia 3D)!

CityEngine is a procedural modelling programme for the automatic generation of cityscapes.  Using one of the example projects supplied or the CityEngine wizard you can generate a textured city model in a dozen clicks.  You can then export it to Vue Vob format to load into Vue.  This version is compatible with all Artist and Professional versions of Vue 9.  It is also compatible with all Artist and Professional versions of Vue 8.4 and Vue 8.5 with a build # higher than 51429 only but imports are limited to 128 materials.

Moving beyond the examples and the wizard the first thing most users are going to want to do is to create a city of their own.  The model is built based on elements you can control.  The street network and associated lots controls the layout of the city.  Obstacle, attribute and height maps can be used to shape the model.  The allocated Computer Generated Architecture (CGA) file tells CityEngine how to create and texture buildings, streets and other elements of the model.

The first obvious step down that route is with the roads themselves.  You can hand draw a road network in CityEngine with its tools. Street networks can also be imported from AutoCAD DXF (dxf), Esri Shapefile (shp) or OpenStreetMaps (osm) files.  Depending on the source you’ll probably need to spend some time tidying up some of the roads and junctions by hand.  Fortunately, while that can take some time the tools, for doing that are easy to use and quick to master.

CityEngine also has a road generation tool to expand on your street network.  For a fictional cityscape I found this a great time saver.  Simply fill in the main routes and then let city engine create the fine detail of side streets and back ways.  You can fine tune the sort of network it builds which is a great help in creating the layout you’re looking for.  Once the road network has been created it will generate the lots inside them.  You can allocate a CGA file to all or part of your network and then have CityEngine generate the models from it.

After generation the city isn’t set in stone.  You can edit the street layout using the same tools as were used to create it.  Redrawing streets reorganises the lots and the buildings are then regenerated to fit the new lots.  You can see this happening live in the display as you drag streets around – a really fun and useful feature.  If you don’t like a particular building you can select the lot and have it generate a new seed number to create a different building randomly or enter values for the attributes of the building to manually shape it.

Obstacle maps can be used to prevent the generation of streets or buildings in inappropriate areas.  This is particularly useful for stopping buildings or random streets appearing in the middle of rivers, parks or where you want to add models built in other 3D software.  You can also set up attribute maps that control values used to generate the models.

Attribute maps, which simply colour channels in image files, to control the types of buildings in particular areas or to control attributes of a building.  So you can use these to create zones in your city of industrial, residential, commercial or park land.  By controlling attributes you could set limits on buildings heights, specify level of detail or the texture sets to be used depending on the attributes used by the CGA file that describes the buildings in your model.

The textures generated are simple UV bit maps.  There is currently no support for separate layers for bump, luminosity, reflection or other effects.  Although the resulting models will look ok for the best results (as with any model imported into Vue) the results can be dramatically improved by enhancing or replacing the textures inside your rendering package of choice.

Another quibble with the exported model is the lack of options for exporting the heightmap based terrain the model in a way that makes them easy to align to the city model.  Although it isn’t impossible to do this by trial and error or by adding markers into the model at the terrain’s corners this process could be easier to achieve.

The facade engine is marked as being a beta feature.  I have managed to achieve reasonable results with the tutorial facade but I found a couple of evenings working with this feature with my own photograph to be quite frustrating resulting in poor results.

Computer Generated Architecture is really at the heart of what CityEngine does.  This is the file that tells it how to procedurally construct the settlement for you.  CityEngine provides two ways to work with these either as text or as a node network.  The node network will be familiar to users of other software where similar tools are used for creating procedural textures or in XFrog plants.  By adding and connecting nodes rules for producing simple or complex models can be defines.  Under the hood the text file defining your city is being written for you.

The node based approach will appeal to a lot of users who are scared of programming.  Personally since I’ve been programming for thirty years I’m quite happy to dig into a new programming language so I’ve spent a lot of my time digging into the text version of CGA.  There are tools to help with making working that way easier too including grammar checking as you work and code highlighting.

Whichever way you work the underlying rules are doing similar things – CGA rules split up, align, move, scale, rotate, extrude, colour and apply textures to shapes.  There are also rules that can add various gable, hip, pyramid or shelf roofs to a building.  They can also pull in external models to add them into a scene – so, for example, you can models street furniture in another programme and them add them automatically to the city.

Unlike traditional modelling where you work with splines, faces or other representations of a single model what you are doing in CityEngine when you work with CGA file is teach the software how to build a whole variety of models for you.  By including random elements the models can have variety so you don’t end up with a city of identical structures but something far more akin to the real world.

There are a variety of sample CGA files that are available to download covering modern, historical and science fiction cityscape production.  Procedural have also provided an extensive set of video tutorials and documentation to support the software and to really help you get into understanding CGA.

Now I don’t think CGA will be for everyone.  When I first started working with 3D if you wanted to include a person in a model you had to model and texture the meshes for them from scratch.  Since then you’ve been able to use software like Poser to work with figures or buy pre-made meshes.  Over time I’d expect the same sort of ecosystem of hobbyists selling and giving away the CGA files  to emerge as has happened with Vue, Poser and pretty much every other kind of 3D software I use.

On paper CityEngine Vue’s major differences from the CityEngine Pro and CityEngine SE are minor.  Like Indie it lacks Python features – since the versions that do have Python are out of my price range I’ve not looked at what it can do with Python in detail but most of those features seem to relate to enhancing export and workflow.  Only CityEngine Pro offers a floating network licence which is unlikely to be an issue for most hobbyists.

My only other concern regards CityEngine’s stability.  I’m running on a 32bit system and, when working with larger models or models with lots of detail, I’ve had a few crashes and times when the CityEngine’s performance has become sluggish.  As with all 3D software I’ve ever used users have to understand there systems limit and work out how that affects the scale and detail of the model they produce.

Hopefully future releases will see a more usable façade engine, more advanced texture options and easier export for matching terrains in other packages.

Overall I’d have to say  CityEngine Vue is a brilliant piece of software.  If I’d known it was coming out I’d have bought it rather than City Engine Indie.  If you just want to work with CityEngine and Vue it’s the perfect choice.  I said in my review of CityEngine Indie that the features included for the price are amazing: well CityEngine Vue’s features are astonishing for the price.   If you want to create scenes of human habitation in Vue, from a simple village to a town to a full cityscape, CityEngine Vue is the ideal complement to Vue’s nature simulations.

When I first saw renders of models produced with Procedural’s CityEngine I was really impressed. However with prices in the Company or Freelance Professional range I thought that, like other high-end CG software, I’d have to look longingly on knowing that only Pros and pirates would ever get to play with it. CityEngine Indie is still expensive but it put City Engine within reach of hobbyists like me.

CityEngine is a procedural modelling programme for the automatic generation of cityscapes. Using one of the example projects supplied or the CityEngine wizard you can generate a textured city model in a dozen clicks. You can then export it to 3DS, Obj or Vue Vob format to load into your preferred rendering application.

Moving beyond the examples and the wizard the first thing most users are going to want to do is to create a city of their own. The model is built based on a number of elements you can control. The street network and associated lots controls the layout of the city. Obstacle, attribute and height maps are used to shape the model. The allocated Computer Generated Architecture (CGA) file tells CityEngine how to create and texture buildings, streets and other elements of the model.

The first obvious step down that route is with the roads themselves. You can hand draw a road network in CityEngine with its tools. Street networks can also be imported from AutoCAD DXF (dxf), Esri Shapefile (shp) or OpenStreetMaps (osm) files. Depending on the source you’ll probably need to spend some time tidying up some of the roads and junctions by hand. Fortunately, while that can take some time the tools, for doing that are easy to use and quick to master.

CityEngine also has a road generation tool to expand on your street network. For a fictional cityscape I found this a great time saver. Simply fill in the main routes and then let city engine create the fine detail of side streets and back ways. You can fine tune the sort of network it builds – a great help in creating the layout you’re looking for. Once the road network has been created it will generate the lots inside them. You can allocate a CGA file to all or part of your network and then have CityEngine generate the models from it.

After generation the city isn’t set in stone. You can edit the street layout using the same tools as you used to create it. Redrawing streets reorganises the lots and the buildings are regenerated to fit. You can see this happening live in the display as you drag streets around – a really fun and useful feature. If you don’t like a particular building you can select the lot and have it generate a new seed number to create a different building randomly or enter values for the attributes of the building to manually shape it.

Obstacle maps can be used to prevent the generation of streets or buildings in inappropriate areas. This is particularly useful for stopping buildings or random streets appearing in the middle of rivers, parks or where you want to add models built in other 3D software. You can also set up attribute maps that control values used to generate the models.

Attribute maps, which simply colour channels in image files, to control the types of buildings in particular areas or to control attributes of a building. So you can use these to create zones in your city of industrial, residential, commercial or park land. By controlling attributes you could set limits on buildings heights, specify level of detail or the texture sets to be used depending on the attributes used by the CGA file that describes the buildings in your model.

The textures generated are simple UV bit maps. There is currently no support for separate textures for different parts of a surface or for separate layers for bump, luminosity, reflection or other effects. Although the resulting models will look ok for the best results (as with any imported model in any 3D Software) the results can be dramatically improved by enhancing or replacing the textures inside your rendering package of choice.

Another quibble with the exported model is the lack of options for exporting the heightmap based terrain the model in a way that makes them easy to align to the city model. Although it isn’t impossible to do this by trial and error or by adding markers into the model at the terrain’s corners this process could be easier to achieve.

The façade engine is a beta feature. I have managed to achieve reasonable results with the tutorial facade but I found a couple of evenings working with this feature with my own photograph to be quite frustrating resulting in poor results.

Computer Generated Architecture is really at the heart of what CityEngine does. This is the file that tells it how to procedurally construct the settlement for you. CityEngine provides two ways to work with these either as text or as a node network. The node network will be familiar to users of other software where similar tools are used for creating procedural textures or in XFrog plants. By adding and connecting nodes rules for producing simple or complex models can be defines. Under the hood the text file defining your city is being written for you.

The node based approach will appeal to a lot of users who are scared of programming. Personally since I’ve been programming for thirty years I’m quite happy to dig into a new programming language so I’ve spent a lot of my time digging into the text version of CGA. There are tools to help with making working that way easier too including grammar checking as you work and code highlighting.

Whichever way you work the underlying rules are doing similar things – CGA rules split up, align, move, scale, rotate, extrude, colour and apply textures to shapes. There are also rules that can add various gable, hip, pyramid or shelf roofs to a building. They can also pull in external models to add them into a scene – so, for example, you can models street furniture in another programme and them add them automatically to the city.

Unlike traditional modelling where you work with splines, faces or other representations of a single model what you are doing in CityEngine when you work with CGA file is teach the software how to build a whole variety of models for you. By including random elements the models can have variety so you don’t end up with a city of identical structures but something far more akin to the real world.

There are a variety of sample CGA files that are available to download covering modern, historical and science fiction cityscape production. Procedural have also provided an extensive set of video tutorials and documentation to support the software and to really help you get into understanding CGA.

Now I don’t think CGA will be for everyone. When I first started working with 3D if you wanted to include a person in a model you had to model and texture the meshes for them from scratch. Since then you’ve been able to use software like Poser to work with figures or buy premade meshes. Over time I’d expect the same sort of ecosystem of hobbyists selling and giving away the CGA files to emerge as has happened with Vue, Poser and pretty much every other kind of 3D software I use.

On paper CityEngine Indie’s major differences from the CityEngine Pro and CityEngine SE are minor. The Indie versions licence agreements limits its use to those with a turnover of less than $200,000 in a financial year. Indie also lacks python features – since the versions that do have python are out of my price range I’ve not looked at what it can do with python in detail but most of those features seem to relate to enhancing export and workflow. Only CityEngine Pro offers a floating network licence which is unlikely to be an issue for most hobbyists or small studios. The last major difference is the limited technical support.

There are no technical support options for CityEngine Indie. Now that may not seem like a big issue but let’s be absolutely clear what that means – other than service releases of the version you buy you will not get any future updates. They do provide a window of a few weeks for getting the next release if you buy a version just before another one comes out. Based on past release history of three releases a year if you really have to have each of the three annual releases you should look at CityEngine Pro and CityEngine SE with a support contract.

Just because you don’t have a technical support package doesn’t mean Procedural will leave you out in the cold. I had a minor issue with my installation that Procedural’s technical support were really helpful in resolving. They also provide forums where their staff provide excellent answers on how to use the software.

My only other concern regards CityEngine’s stability. I’m running on a 32bit system and, when working with larger models or models with lots of detail, I’ve had a few crashes and times when the CityEngine’s performance has become sluggish. As with all 3D software I’ve ever used users have to understand there systems limit and work out how that affects the scale and detail of the model they produce.

Hopefully future releases will see a more usable façade engine, more advanced texture options and easier export for matching terrains in other packages.

Overall I’d have to say I think CityEngine Indie is a brilliant piece of software and one of my best buys of recent years. I’ve a few quibbles and features I’d like to see but none of them are really serious problems. The features included for the price are amazing. If you want to create scenes of human habitation, from a simple village to a town to a full cityscape, CityEngine Indie is the ideal tool.

If it seems like I’ve gone quite quiet here its because I’m playing with new toys. First of all I’ve been getting to grips with Vue 9 Infinite with its excellent new features. Re-lighting is a wonderful enhancement and is a massive time saver for me. Texture resizing is also a massive time saver for me as I used to resize large image textures manually but now Vue can take care of it for me.

Alongside that I got a copy of CityEngine and I’ve found its pretty easy to lose an evening getting to grips with one part of it. So far I think I’ve got the hang of bringing in terrain data from NASA hgt files, road systems from OpenStreet maps, building street networks and modelling streets and buildings using programatic rules. The facade wizard has managed to stump me at the moment but I probably just need to work through the tutorials to crack it.

I’ve not forgotten gaming in all of this 3D fun. Along with continuing writing on my little RPG I’m using CityEngine to model part of the city my game is set in. My ultimate aim is to be able to render pictures of parts of the city for use as hand outs in game.

I would post something but I hate my early experimentation putting anyone else off either Vue 9 or CityEngine.

This is my first Vue 8 Infinite render made as part of a tutorial about linear light sources for Vue I’m working on. The majority of the scene is the Film Noir Detective Office but the desk lamp is my first model made with Moments of Inspiration (MoI). Even though I made it to illustrate using a series of lights to simulate a linear light source I’m quite pleased with it. If I get time I may come back to it and replace some of the lower detail objects on the desk to improve the picture.

A quick test render I just finished of The Gothic Castle from Cornucopia 3D’s which I picked up last night. I tweaked the wall material to make it darker and the glass materials to make them illuminated. I also played a bit with the atmosphere for effect. I darkened up the final render using Vue’s post processing.

• Weather = Yuch so just messin' around with Vue #
• @very_true_thing So did it work? in reply to very_true_thing #
• Comment spammers found my site yesterday and (so far) akismet has caught every single one of em #
• Sustained in my editing efforts by an excellent batch of Pork and Mushroom Curry http://bit.ly/AgZze #recipe #food #
• RT @AllenVarney William Shatner masterfully recites Sarah Palin's farewell speech (Conan O'Brien): via @JamesWallis #
• RT: @jearle Big Cat sighting in Scotland. – it's a Puma, by the look of things, running wild. #
• RT: @KimKnox ooh this looks very cool. Trailer for Waters of Mars – Doctor Who #
• So I need to join Scribd to download a pdf copy of a document but not to print it? Stupid controlfreakery and bad for the environment too #
• And printing from Scribd in Firefox = completely broken too. 20 sheets of paper wasted. /rant #
• RT @jearle If you Google "Scottish Cuisine", my Munchy Box blog post is on the front page. http://bit.ly/e640w #
• @jearle Wish I'd photos of the Scottish Indian I had a business trip. Unlike any English Indian I've had. Clearly related to your Munchy Box in reply to jearle #
• @jearle I wish I could work that into my current project. I'm forcing myself to stick to just London so it wont get out of hand in reply to jearle #
• Can it really take an hour and a half to visit the Pencil Museum? Is it twinned with the Hotel California? #
• @KimKnox So how cheesy is Satin Spar's cover or is it classy like Dark Host? in reply to KimKnox #
• @KimKnox Good news – I'll look forward to seeing it then. Meanwhile contemplating if IsItCheese.com or CheeseOrNot.com is a better URL… in reply to KimKnox #
• @KimKnox Hmm. That ones barely work safe… in reply to KimKnox #
• Aarrgh. Basic maths failure. What was I thinking when I wrote a table for a 3d6 roll with the first entry being for a roll of 2? #
• Some really nice entries for the Vue 3D Environment Competition 2009 http://bit.ly/1b7BE9 glad I don't have to pick the winner #
• listening to "cacharpaya – incantation 1982" ♫ http://blip.fm/~at2mc #
• listening to "Capercaillie – Coisich A Rùin – video clip Gàidhlig Gaidhli" ♫ http://blip.fm/~atgp8 #
• listening to "MANDOLIN RAIN original video" ♫ http://blip.fm/~atp60 #
• RT @criticalhits Why can't we show these ads instead of Evony http://is.gd/1TeiZ #
• I always thought some perfumes should be banned under the Hague Conventions http://bit.ly/t2LBr #
• @jearle lol. We'll keep that off the banned list just for you. in reply to jearle #
• @KimKnox Let Blur distract you. That way the rest of Write Club don't feel so bad about our pitiful comparative word counts in reply to KimKnox #
• for @KimKnox your mission should you choose to accept it is to finish Space Fluff ♫ http://blip.fm/~autqy #
• RT @johnmcc: Probably the best explanation of the xhtml 2 announcement I've yet seen: http://bit.ly/2pSCJN via @jearle #
• Will economics defeat Moore's Law? http://bit.ly/ThLjm #
• @KimKnox Sounds like you need this instead of Mission Impossible ♫ http://blip.fm/~auw9u #
• Looking for the Johnny Clegg original I found this cover ♫ http://blip.fm/~av040 #
• listening to "Tanita Tikaram – Twist In My Sobriety" ♫ http://blip.fm/~av0pd #
• listening to "Pet Shop Boys – Suburbia (HD)" ♫ http://blip.fm/~av1gx #
• Hunting for the early 90s rock cover. This isn't it but hey… ♫ http://blip.fm/~av1x0 #
• And it definitly isn't this one either – I give up ♫ http://blip.fm/~av2gz #
• Thats a tough one RT @mediaguardian: Vote for your favourite TV show of the decade: http://bit.ly/4t5loz. #
• From the Guardian: 'Swine Flu readiness has become a competitive sport'. Will we be hosting the world cup? http://bit.ly/kHmjv #
• @richeym The Wires really caught up. When I voted The West Wing was ahead of it. in reply to richeym #
• RT @DanDiplo Why you shouldn't design birthday cakes using Microsoft Word…. http://bit.ly/m484u #fail #programming #webdevelopment #
• Sausage Brown Barm Red Sauce #famishedfriday #
• @JamesWallis Far too early to call the Ashes because of three little words: England Batting Collapse in reply to JamesWallis #
• RT @guardiantech: Volomedia claims podcast patent http://bit.ly/yNcsq #
• @very_true_thing #VisitLondon (http://ustre.am/4n0W) Tower bridge faster than twitter – Just closed when I got the page loaded #
• listening to "The Peanuts Theme" ♫ http://blip.fm/~az5p3 #

It only seems like yesterday that Kim had a new story out but it was all of a couple of weeks ago (just enough time to read an Ian Rankin novel and a couple of history books). Her latest novella, Dark Host, was a Brava finalist and I’ve read a bit of it before so I’m looking forward to it. And as an added bonus I’ve no worries about including the cover on my blog because its very tasteful

I think I need a few extra hours in the day – if I did each of the following would probably be its own post…

Having finished a fascinating book on illegal gambling in the UK in the ’50s I started reading the first volume of Michael Palins’ diaries on Saturday and there a great read…

One unfortunate combination of words set an idea for a humorous, slightly strange Murder Mystery short story idea off and I wrote the first four pages yesterday…

That stopped me finishing the longer game writing project thats so close to having a complete first draft its bugging me…

So I was going to tackle it in the evening but I got an e-mail with an offer from Cornucopia3D for GeoControl2 which I’ve been tempted by for a while. So I ended up playing with that instead…

Plus Kim’s got a new novella out, Flesh and Shadows, with a very cheesy cover but I’ll probably give it a read because despite the cover its supposed to be Science Fiction not Mills and Boon…

Oh and having decided not to take out a subscription to the new version of Pyramid magazine because now its themed of the first six issues I’d only found three I was interested in. So inevitably the latest issue is one I wanted to pick up…

Then there’s the vue video tutorial from Quadspinner I want to write a review of for my Vue News Blog…

I’m just glad that The Wire (which is good but not as good as some of its exponents would like us to believe) is on three nights a week so I know when its finished its time to get some sleep or I don’t know how I’d know to end the day.

I’ve just spent the evening messing around with Vue 7. Nothing really to show from tonight but I made the yet to be titled picture above last night. I’ve resized it for the web from a larger, print quality render and cropped it a little too. The ship is from Cornucopia 3D and the Water Dragon from Daz. Vaguely inspired by my long since finished nautical Ravenloft campaign.