City Engine Streetmaps

[ravells]

I'm playing with the auto street generation feature in City Engine (don't have the time at the moment to relearn the coding stuff like making and texturing buildings) ... one really nice feature is that you can export the streets and lots as .DXF files, which means that you can import them into a vector editor and you have lovely crisp lines. Attached is an example (which took about 5 mins to make - I'm sure it shows), where I was just dialling different settings at random and 'growing' the city street network with those new settings. Exported to Serif Drawplus and then saved as a .pdf. The zoomability is fantastic. No loss of resolution and the file size is 180 kb. Each lot is a separate vector object - great for editing.

Vector Rocks for cities!

[ravells]

Just seeing what I can do with the thing now....long way to go.

[Ascension]

Looks promising.

[gilgamec]

A lot of that looks like I'd expected from CityEngine: way too rectilinear for something medieval-esque. Some of the neighbourhoods in the first image there are less organized, though: the easternmost one is particularly good. I do note that many of your lots are tiny scraps and wedges, though ... how are those going to work?

[ravells]

Yeah, it's really too rectilinear for medieval stuff...I'm looking at ways in which to break it up a bit. I can delete the little wedges. In my eternal quest to make the lazy man's city, I'm looking at ways that I can improve the result by being able to make global changes rather than individual ones. The win here (for me) is that the lots are all vector shapes...I have a feeling that this is going to involve going from Drawplus into photoshop and back again a few times to see if I can rough it up a little. What I'm aiming for is to be able to set out the rough city limits and the main roads and then have CE do all the 'filling in' of the boring stuff.

What I've found is that the hardest thing about drawing a convincing city is mapping the outskirts, where the blocks break up into individual buildings - it just never seems to look convincing unless it's hand made. Putting a wall around the city is an easy solution (everything stops at the wall) but I'm trying to get one to work without a wall.

As I said....there's a long way to go, although fortunately, I enjoy the fiddling part so the journey will be fun!

[Larb]

I googled city engine after seeing this because it looks like really interesting software. It is rather expensive. =P I look forward to seeing how this turns out though.