I've been wanting to produce something in CityEngine that was a little more pleasing on the eye compared to the planning projects that I had previously worked on. Taking inspiration from the work that Fold 7 did with CityEngine to produce an advert for a Ministry of Sound release, I wanted to create a city that had a wider vision, more than just simple blocks and streets.
The guys at Fold 7 did a great job in taking the Ministry of Sound logo and creating a city around it, revealing the logo at the end of the animation. They are obviously experts in producing a high end visual product so I don't think I can match that but it would be fun to produce a city based on the same principal.
The initial work flow that I thought would work would be:
1. Decide on a city design template
2. Create the roads and blocks network
3. Generate a CGA rule file to create the city
4. Attempt to produce a few high detail renders and export the city as a 3D web scene.
So here is one of the end renders that I produced using the Luxology render engine within Bentley MicroStation V8i. I am most definitely a beginner in using MicroStation and Luxology and the amount of set up options is outrageous. Thankfully, a colleague had used the software in some testing and could at least point me in the right direction. I'll show more images in a later post.
The city design template
New Zealand has great symbology everywhere (mostly visualised in tattoo's!) and so making a decision on what to base the city on was a pleasure. From the massive array of images and symbology I decided that I wanted to create a city in the mould of a Tiki. The symbol has great significance for the Maori population and forms part of the national cultural heritage.
A simple scan of the internet gave a raft of excellent images to use as a template for the city. Compared to the previous projects I would actually use very little GIS knowledge to produce this city which I felt could free up more time to put towards more creative use. I did however import the chosen Tiki image into ArcGIS and geo-reference the image so that I could control the size of the city. I had in a previous test made a city that was around 5km by 5km which turned out to be far too large to be handled properly in both CityEngine and the 3D web viewer. I decided that a city 1.5km by 750m should suit the needs of the project whilst still proving easy to handle when it comes to visualisation.
Generating the road network and blocks
The image below shows the Tiki after it has been georeferenced (potentially to be used in a wider context) with a hillshade layer underneath.
The lines, that would form the road network, were captured as line features and saved as a shapefile. The shapefile could easily be imported into CityEngine and took around an hour to capture and modify as necessary. Not all of the detail in the above first cut of data was eventually used, the Tiki was simplified and amended to help create data that was a little easier to work with.
After the line features were imported into CityEngine creating the blocks was a fairly simple process. For the town I didn't actually want to produce a city with roads, instead using the new water texture to make the city appear as a group of islands. I therefore made the roads as narrow as possible to accommodate as much land as possible within the shapes. After a period of clean up and further amendment of the roads I was happy with the first cut of parcels that I would use to create the city.
The parcel network that I created was made so that I could utilise a number of start rules to generate different building models based on the location within the Tiki. The eyes of the Tiki have been generated by using the skeleton subdivision, this has created what looks like a pie split into lots like slices based on minimum width and area values. The spike, above the nose, and the helmet (start rule names I have given these pieces) have not been subdivided at all and I will generate a model that covers the entire area. The rest of the head including the mouth and tongue have had the recursion subdivision applied which has also been applied to the rest of the body (suburbia).
In the next blog post I will run through some of the CGA code that was generated for each of the parts of the city.
No comments:
Post a Comment