Using City Engine

[ravells]

I haven't had much time recently to continue my work with CE, but I took some time off today. I took a break from the 3d stuff to see how it would cope with plain old top down 2d mapping and I was really pleasantly surprised.

CE has a 'scene light' (i.e. the sun) which you can position, adjust the shadows intensity for etc. It's pretty simple (no soft shadows, ambient occlusion etc) but it's good enough.
The camera angles allow for orthogonal views and you can adjust the field of view of the camera.

What is quite cool is that because adjusting the pitch of the roofs is an easy global operation, if you want the roofs to catch shadow and you don't want the shadows to be really long, you can make the pitch of the roofs really steep. You won't see the super steep roofs in a top down orthogonal view which is quite cool.

So here are some pics of the experiments showing top down orthogonal without texture, with texture and shadow (note how the shadows 'fall' properly over gabled roofs) and a forced perspective view. You can see how steep I've made the roofs in the first picture.

The 'beauty shot' is the second picture. You can switch the black wireframe lines on and off, leaving them on gives a more 'graphic' outline look. I'm experimenting here with 'L' shaped procedurally generated buildings. CE does default L shaped, U shaped and the good old rectangular shaped. If you want to get more complicated than that, its a case of more involved coding.

And here is a little video editing the streets on the fly. Note how the buildings redraw themselves to conform to the new street pattern.