Monday, 27 July 2009

CityEngine to Unity pipeline demo

I've blogged many times about the very impressive CityEngine, a unique professional tool for creating, visualisating and exporting cityscapes. As such it is of notable use to the games industry with a quick and easy route into either 3D Max or, as can be seen in the vid below, the Unity Engine.

Unity (blogged about this app/engine before, it's also one I plan to use for my teaching next year) supports a number of input formats, allowing for direct integration with CityEngine; with the following features:

- Direct model export to Unity via Autodesk FBX including textures, thus, generate'n'play your environment with a few clicks only
- Arbitrary mesh granularities such as per-material groups or editable scene nodes are possible thanks to CityEngine's various export options such as "merge by material" or "single node objects"
- Collider meshes: The CityEngine's CGA shape grammar is a perfect tool to generate and control low-res collider meshes in Unity (and they always adapt to model iterations)

See http://www.procedural.com/ for full details.

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