Jul 2009
CityEngine Review
26/07/09 12:31
CityEngine
Incredibly powerful urban habitation modeling tool
by Albert Kiefer
Both in Architectural visualizations, in certain games situations but also in archeologic reconstructions it is sometimes inevitable to create or recreate an urban environment. A habitated area that shows human presence. Historically this habitation grows from a number of conditions present at a certain geographic location such as a path, a road, a river, etc. People will start settling in places like these and build houses and streets along trading routes that establish themselves in a village that evolves into a town and than maybe into a huge metropolitan city.
Swiss company Procedural have developed a software specifically for this purpose and it’s doing a fantastic job at it. However it’s not your regular easy drag and drop type of software. Obviously CityEngine does provide a great drag and drop functionality. It supports this by dragging rules based procedures to pre-selected surface areas. But it is by no means a software for the casual user. Obviously at its price point starting at 3450 US Dollars (there is an educational license for just 695 US Dollars), this software is not intended for the casual user but for professionals in the architecture, games, film, archeologic and general visualization companies for which the seemingly steep pricing is not a problem since the software will earn itself back very quickly.
Procedurally Structured
So how does CityEngine work its magic? Well it starts more or less the same way a city develops over time. So basically it starts from simple road network. You can for example import xml, dxf data from any source (like openstreetmap.org) and start building from these street networks, or you can have CityEngine generate a network for you based on a series of procedural rules.
After the network is generated you can command CityEngine to draw lots between those streets. These can be subdivided further in smaller lots. After this process of subdivision is complete (you can, by selecting areas, constrain the generation of lots to areas you like) CityEngine can start drawing buildings onto each individual lot or to sets of lots that you pre select. This process is very straightforward and in no time you have created a very convincing urban area with lots of different buildings.
from basic street network to elaborate lot subdivision is just a simple three click process
Now generating networks of streets and subdividing the areas between these streets with small lots of ground is nice. But obviously there, where the houses start to build themselves is where the real CityEngine magic starts to work. CityEngine does this by a procedural modeling language and they have called this modelling structure the Shape Grammar. In the shape grammar of a particular building they write down a set of rules that geometry, and even texturemaps, will behave to depending on a specific situation. This way you can create stunningly adaptive buildings that seems to just know how to behave under certain conditions.
a section of shape grammar code next to a building (might not be the building for this code)
Make a building taller and it automatically adds new floors to compensate for the extended height. Make it wider and the structure adds more windows to avoid large blind walls.
In their free 30 day demo version they have a set of shape grammar scripts to recreate the Petronas Towers, the Parthenon and the Candler building. That way you can start to dissect how to work with this procedural scripting language.
by selecting subdivided lot sections each can be assigned instructions via shape grammar rules
CityEngine is very powerful for games development too because it can simultaneously generate different levels of details (for instance for distant buildings in relation to a player, or for a simpler collision detection geometry model). And it can export in a variety of formats for popular games engines.
All in all CityEngine is a very powerful package for modeling and simulating urban civilizations. They have even done a great job of rebuilding ancient Pompei (take a look at that movie here). It’s even a great conceptual tool for quickly investigating different massing and shape strategies by architects. But it is certainly not for the casual user. They have now expanded their terrain to include a Mac version as well but I have had serious issues with both the graphics engine and professional Mac video card (ATI Radeon X1900 XT with 512Mb Vram) and also Mac formatted xml files exported from open streetmap (it just does not read them because of a different file naming structure. In my case I had to disable the CityEngine shader on my MacPro 8 core Xeon system because it basically stopped interacting with even a one house shaded setup.
I can even very well see a lower cost version being developed that will sell based on selling rules sets for buildings and simulated streets and lots in a more consumer oriented way wich will certainlly find its way to broader user base.
Incredibly powerful urban habitation modeling tool
by Albert Kiefer
Both in Architectural visualizations, in certain games situations but also in archeologic reconstructions it is sometimes inevitable to create or recreate an urban environment. A habitated area that shows human presence. Historically this habitation grows from a number of conditions present at a certain geographic location such as a path, a road, a river, etc. People will start settling in places like these and build houses and streets along trading routes that establish themselves in a village that evolves into a town and than maybe into a huge metropolitan city.
Swiss company Procedural have developed a software specifically for this purpose and it’s doing a fantastic job at it. However it’s not your regular easy drag and drop type of software. Obviously CityEngine does provide a great drag and drop functionality. It supports this by dragging rules based procedures to pre-selected surface areas. But it is by no means a software for the casual user. Obviously at its price point starting at 3450 US Dollars (there is an educational license for just 695 US Dollars), this software is not intended for the casual user but for professionals in the architecture, games, film, archeologic and general visualization companies for which the seemingly steep pricing is not a problem since the software will earn itself back very quickly.
Procedurally Structured
So how does CityEngine work its magic? Well it starts more or less the same way a city develops over time. So basically it starts from simple road network. You can for example import xml, dxf data from any source (like openstreetmap.org) and start building from these street networks, or you can have CityEngine generate a network for you based on a series of procedural rules.
After the network is generated you can command CityEngine to draw lots between those streets. These can be subdivided further in smaller lots. After this process of subdivision is complete (you can, by selecting areas, constrain the generation of lots to areas you like) CityEngine can start drawing buildings onto each individual lot or to sets of lots that you pre select. This process is very straightforward and in no time you have created a very convincing urban area with lots of different buildings.
from basic street network to elaborate lot subdivision is just a simple three click process
Now generating networks of streets and subdividing the areas between these streets with small lots of ground is nice. But obviously there, where the houses start to build themselves is where the real CityEngine magic starts to work. CityEngine does this by a procedural modeling language and they have called this modelling structure the Shape Grammar. In the shape grammar of a particular building they write down a set of rules that geometry, and even texturemaps, will behave to depending on a specific situation. This way you can create stunningly adaptive buildings that seems to just know how to behave under certain conditions.
a section of shape grammar code next to a building (might not be the building for this code)
Make a building taller and it automatically adds new floors to compensate for the extended height. Make it wider and the structure adds more windows to avoid large blind walls.
In their free 30 day demo version they have a set of shape grammar scripts to recreate the Petronas Towers, the Parthenon and the Candler building. That way you can start to dissect how to work with this procedural scripting language.
by selecting subdivided lot sections each can be assigned instructions via shape grammar rules
CityEngine is very powerful for games development too because it can simultaneously generate different levels of details (for instance for distant buildings in relation to a player, or for a simpler collision detection geometry model). And it can export in a variety of formats for popular games engines.
All in all CityEngine is a very powerful package for modeling and simulating urban civilizations. They have even done a great job of rebuilding ancient Pompei (take a look at that movie here). It’s even a great conceptual tool for quickly investigating different massing and shape strategies by architects. But it is certainly not for the casual user. They have now expanded their terrain to include a Mac version as well but I have had serious issues with both the graphics engine and professional Mac video card (ATI Radeon X1900 XT with 512Mb Vram) and also Mac formatted xml files exported from open streetmap (it just does not read them because of a different file naming structure. In my case I had to disable the CityEngine shader on my MacPro 8 core Xeon system because it basically stopped interacting with even a one house shaded setup.
I can even very well see a lower cost version being developed that will sell based on selling rules sets for buildings and simulated streets and lots in a more consumer oriented way wich will certainlly find its way to broader user base.
HDR Lightstudio 1.5 announced
by Albert Kiefer
The developers at HDR LightStudio have just announced version 1.5 of their high dynamic range image creation software. Now I almost always enjoy using my Mac system, but it’s on occasions like this that I cannot help but feel a little left out because of a really nice piece of software that I could use in my every day production of visualization or general 3D illustration work.
Just one look at the interface and the options in this package show that it’s a really very well rounded out package that enables you to quickly generate custom HDRI maps as a lighting map for your 3D scenes and instantly make your work look better.
Since High Dynamic Range Images can also be used in radiosity calculations you can use the image both as a reflection map (for the cool refelctions in a scene) and at the same time as an image map that drives the lighting calculations.
Let’s hope that somehow a nice OS miracle will happen and make these people develop this for Mac OS X too! I will still try and review this package on my Dell Laptop as soon as it’s released. I’ll keep you posted on my findings.
Axceleon Turns Next Page For Distributed Rendering
16/07/09 12:07
by Albert Kiefer
Axceleon, a leader in high performance distributed computing solutions for render farms and clusters today announced that EnFuzion is the first commercial product on the market today to enable seamless rendering with major 3D applications in the Amazon EC2 Cloud.
more on Axceleon’s website
ZBrush 3.2 for Mac OS X released
03/07/09 09:52
Pixologic have just released version 3.2 of their flagship product Zbrush. This release currently is only for Mac OS X.
The new version which is available for immediate download here contains the usual optimizations and bug fixes but more importantly contains some core functionality of the new goZBrush which is going to improve te workflow beteen ZBrush and Maya, Modo and Cinema 4D (I think the PC version will obviously support 3DS Max when it is released).
more information about goZbrush can be found hereAlso great new is that with the new release come two plug-ins that were supported by earlier versions (PC) of ZBrush but now are available to Mac users too. They are decimation master, a plug-in for simplifying the very heavy meshes that ZBrush can generate for use in production packages like Maya, Cinema 4D, and Modo. Not that it’s impossible to work with heavy meshes in the programs but often times it’s just not that practical in a production envirnoment to animate these very heavy files.
these plug-ins can be picked up right here