Procedural System Structure, modelling the interiors of building on a grand scale?

The need for a cost-effective, efficient generation and visualization of complex 3D virtual city models plays an increasingly important role in a wide variety of virtual reality related fields including computer games, virtual city guides, social networks, geographic information systems, urban planning, training simulators etc.

The Structure system is a modular and procedural city generation app with the selling point of claiming to overcome the main limitation normally found in virtual city models and games: the "Locked Door Syndrome". Although there are enterable buildings in urban games or city simulations, normally only a small fraction of the buildings can be entered. This is due to the sheer number of buildings in a typical city.

Given limited development times and memory requirements, it is infeasible for developers to create such a large amount of building interiors using the traditional asset creation pipeline, where all buildings in a city have to be individually modelled and placed by artists. To the best knowledge of the creators, current existing solutions attempting to generate or model virtual cities are generating only "fake" building exteriors without indoor areas.

Having buildings with fully exploarable interiors, makes it possible to have dynamic, destructible environments, opening the door to innovative gameplay opportunities. The system is using PhysX (tm) as physics middleware, but does not require dedicated hardware or additional software like. Authoring of destroyable objects is done in the DCC package and the system is automatically handling the destruction at runtime.

Only the portions that are immediately needed are physicalized for collision detection and response. The use of this lazy generation scheme combined with a modular system and instancing, allows the use of only a fraction of the memory that a model of the entire interior and exterior city would otherwise require. Therefore, the system presented allows for exploration of a large city on a standard personal computer or laptop with a video card supporting OpenGL, Shader Model 1.1 (Geforce3 series and up). Esoteric hardware is not necessary.

http://proceduralcity.com/