Can you generate a city with ICE? I don't know, but I figured I might give it a try.
Getting a very rough cityscape going wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Fixing some artifacts and adding more functionality (e.g. texture maps to control the Manhattan-ness of the streets or the average height of buildings in districts) shouldn't be too hard.

As far as getting some actual building architecture in there, I don't know. After reading through some papers, it appears that the way to do it is via a "split grammar". Not sure whether this can be implemented in ICE. I guess I'll try. ICE is so much fun.

Hi Chris,

That's a great idea. I've myself also always been intrigued by city generation. However I wonder if that is not too much for ICE? To which point should something leaves the shore of ICE and go into regular code? I am not quite sure myself. In that case, should a new ICE node (plugin) be created that would execute the city-fication that you could use into a regular ICE Modelling tree rather than trying to do it all in ICE?

Anyway, post anything here if you make any leeway in that area,

Claude

I don't know how to write code. But everything I've done so far was perfect for ICE. The tree isn't that complicated, the creation process works module by module and is very visual, and the whole thing evaluates pretty quickly. Regular code would be at a disadvantage in my opinion.

The building generation could be more of an issue. It'll have to rely on a grammar, which is similar to an L system. It should be possible though. You'd create an array that you rewrite based on a rule set. Then you read out the array index by index and use a case node to decide how that entry should be translated into geometry.

reminds me of this:

http://www.paoloemilioselva.it/citygenerator.html

But with the ever expanding features of ICE, even more fun stuff is emerging. Good luck on developing this more


rob

Nice. See cool opportunities of GhostTown for 3ds max videos on youtube!

Looking great so far!

I don't want to bore you, but every time I make a successful baby step I'm happy. So I've successfully made a simple L system. The next step is to allow parameters and make the L system draw a polygon. And then finally it shall be used to make building shapes based on certain rules. This may be over my head, but I'll try anyway, haha.

My L system can now make polygons. This has been much more straightforward so far than I thought.

I like where this thread is going and the WIP posting for other to see the evolution of a tool is a bonus,

Good work Chris!

That's really cool. Looks like it can all be done in ICE indeed

Claude