17th century London in the CryEngine

Crytek recently, with the help of the British Library and GameCity, run a competition called Off the Map. Essentially for this University and college students were asked to use British Library maps for the creation of urban environments with the company's CryEngine.

 

 

The winning entry above has recreated London around the time of the Great Fire (1666) and is a very impressive reminder of what game engines can achieve in 2013 in the urban modelling area.

Gamr7 and Urban PAD is no more

Sad to report that one of the automated/semi-automated urban modelling solutions which I reported on in the past (several times in fact) is no longer a going concern; French developer Gamr7 has folded and the tool itself (Urban PAD) is also no more. There is a short announcement (and explanation) on the website of the company here.
This is quite unfortunate as it was a very promising tool and it definitely made inroads over the last few years. While there are of course other solutions still available, it is sad to see one that has been progressing for 5 years now come to an end.

Bay Bridge Explorer iOS application powered by UDK

On a similar San Francisco related theme to the previous post I have been recently playing around with the Bay Area Bridge Explorer iOS application which can be found on the iTunes store for free. The application allows you to interactively explore the changes to the Bay Bridge by driving through the new routes (I have just been going through the eastbound detour), made necessary for seismic safery reasons. Although only one of these is available (for now at least), it is still a very innovative way to expose and inform an audience to urban planning processes.

The application is powered by Unreal and is basically a simple first-person 3D driving game with touch and tilt functions. UDK is put through its paces very well here so it is also worth downloading and playing around with if you want to see the potential of a gaming engine for further work in this field.

CyberCity 3D updates building model repository

Time to revisit an urban modelling solution I covered a long time ago on this blog (in its first year in fact!) which is still around and has just had a very recent update/upgrade. This is CyberCity 3D which has, earlier this month, added multipatch footprints and shapefile buildings with roof features (according to their press release found here) on their Off-The-Shelf building library.

CyberCity 3D currently covers 48 major cities worth of 3D building data (mostly US-based according to the list on their site but also ones found elsewhere, such as Paris and Amsterdam, amongst others) with free partial samples of this information also available for download should you want to check them out before purchasing.

CyberCity 3D's website is well worth checking out on the whole, not just to read about the current press release outlined above forming the latest update of their service but also some of their other initiatives too (such as, for example, ArcGIS integration, their models being featured on Google Maps for mobile and others).

http://www.cybercity3d.com/

Urban Pad now exports to UDK

Urban Pad, one of the most most prominent contenders in the auto/semi-automatic urban modelling field, has now received its September update to version 3.0.9. While there are many interesting features on this, from the obligarory bug fixes to using templates as defaults to assist begineer users, the one that caught my attention is the streamlining of the ability to export to Epic's UDK (as an .fbx file). A test example of this is shown below.

If you want to try this out yourselves a short tutorial of this can be found here while the Urban Pad application itself can be downloaded as a trial version from here.

Urban Network Analysis, MIT's free urban planning application

MIT (and in particular the City Form Research Group) has recently released an application called Urban Network Analysis (UNA) which measures how the layout of a city impacts the life of the people in it. This is done by taking into consideration many parameters such as for example the volume of traffic and the number of a variety of services and resources available to the populace. Buildings themselves are also very important to the calculations taking place.

More importantly, the application is completely free and available for ArcGIS as an open-source plug-in. It is definitely recommended that urban planners/modellers (seeing that applications like CityEngine are now integrated in its pipeline this could be of significant interest to 3D virtual city creators too) check this out here.

The Engineer article on Bath/BU EngD project

As I have posted in the past I am part of the supervisory team for a CDE (Centre for Digital Entertainment) funded EngD (Doctorate in Engineering) project. CDE is a collaborative effort between Bournemouth University and the University of Bath which is funded by EPSRC in order to create a doctoral training centre with a VFX, animation and visualization focus.

The EngD project that I am involved in co-supervising, which focuses on using artificial intelligence to model how crowds move, is, other than BU and UoB, also involving Buro Happold, a large engineering consultancy where the student is housed for a big part of his doctorate. The outcome of the project could help architects design better buildings. This has now attracted some publicity with an article at The Engineer website.

For more information about this project I am involved with, and also quotes from Julian Padget from the UoB (who is also the lead academic supervisor) check the article itself here.

Stop motion animation for an urban environment

Spotted this on the Digital Urban blog and thought I'd post something about it too; Miguel Warrand has created an excellent stop motion animation while studying digital art which focuses on an urban environment with heavy traffic and traffic jams. You can see the video of this below and is well worth checking out both for advocates of stop motion and visual effects but also urban modellers who can draw inspiration from new ways of visualising urban environments and their animation.

What is of even more interest for me is the hand-painted, non-photorealistic pencil-sketched effect achieved in the video which makes it even more appealling. A great piece of work.

Procedural bought by ESRI

Procedural, a company producing an urban modelling tool (CityEngine) I have blogged about many times in the last few years, has now been bought out by ESRI. ESRI has been around since 1969 and is most famous for the very popular GIS tool called ArcGIS. It is believed that CityEngine will be integrated with that but also remain available as standalone too.

CityEngine has been making the news for quite awhile now with some very high profile clients using it for their city modelling needs, so I suppose this was inevitable. Furthermore, integrating this with ArcGIS could prove to be a masterstroke as ArcGIS' 3D urban modelling functionality will be significantly spruced up as a result of this.

GTA Liberty City on Google Maps

Who said Google Maps could only be used for real-world cities? GTA4.net has recreated, using the Google Maps API and over 80,000 screenshots, an interactive map of the New York City depiction in the popular Rockstar Grand Theft Auto 4 game.

What is of course most impressive about this depiction is the Street View function which is almost complete and makes me hope for similar projects for other in-game virtual cities and locations. You can find this (and like me spend half an hour exploring it!) here.

A standard for 3D virtual cities?

A piece of news of interest to urban modelling researchers which CG Architect has reported; the Open Geospatial Consortium and Special Interest Group 3D (SIG 3D) have now signed an agreement of cooperation in standards for the visualization and exchange of 3D geospatial content. The focus of the exchange of this content is of course via web-based technologies.

This is an important agreement as SIG 3D memebers defined the first version of CityGML (which I have posted about in the past), essentially an open data model framework/encoding standard for 3D virtual cities. This agreement moves closer to something that many researchers (but also developers) have been debating for for years, i.e. a more accepted/official/standardized format in this field. This will be boosted by the Open Geospatial Consortium's authority and credentials as it consists of currently over 410 government agencies, research institutions, industry partners and Universities.

More information about CityGML and the Open Geospatial Consortium can be found here and here.

ghostTown urban modelling 3DS Max script

ghostTown is another fantastic effort to utilize 3D Studio Max's Maxscript language to generate an urban modelling tool. Features include low polygon/high polygon buildings, a tool for road layouts, a system for material usage and others. The script currently works on the latest version of Max (2011).

Well worth checking out by first looking at the video above and then visiting the site here. The best thing about ghostTown is of course the fact that it is free and very available for anyone interested in exploring the potential of automatic/semi-automatic city generation.

Real-life Manhattan versus Crysis 2 Manhattan

I just got Crysis 2 yesterday (both for the PC and my XBox) and while the jury's still out on that one (I am sorely disappointed by the fact that there is no editor with the game, how can that measure up to approaches like Epic Games' UDK?!), here is a very interesting comparison to a real life scene as opposed to one depicted in the game.

Courtesy of Kotaku, the video here compares an area of downtown Manhattan where State St. meets Bridge St. in the financial district. This is a great example of how close real-time engines are getting to approximating real-world urban locations.

Cities in Motion

A game with a very strong 3D urban modelling theme is Cities in Motion, a city-based transport simulator (which is at the moment available on PC platform only). The game operates by allowing players to construct their own transportation company, building a subsequent public network with a variety of vehicle types with the ultimate objective being of course to generate a successful/efficient network.

More info about Cities in Motion can be found here, it is also worth pointing out that at the moment there is also a competition in progress with with one prize winner being offered the chance to travel to one of the cities featured in game. This would be Vienna, Helsinki, Berlin or Amsterdam and is to be won on the creation of a customized map using the in-game map editor.

City Kit, the new kid on the block in automated virtual city generation apps

City Kit is a new app which focuses on automatic virtual city generation; this time as a plug-in for Cinema 4D. With a fairly low price ($149) the app is capable of instant city generation with some cool additional features such as, most notably, being able to choose between night and day (a feature that many would find quite useful for composition shots).

You can see a demo of the app in the video above, for more info and purchasing City Kit go to http://greyscalegorilla.com/citykit/.

Bringing historic maps to 3D

A team from the University of East Anglia has come up with a new way to digitise, in 3D, the outlines of buildings on historic maps which can lead to a more efficient reconstruction of virtual heritage areas. Published in Elsevier's Computers And Graphics journal the methodology is based on the colouring of maps.

On the occasion where buildings are displayed in characteristic colours, the process is automatic. This operates by detecting blocks of colour on a scan of the map, and then subsequently highlighting the edge of each block. This then generates a clear outline of the building(s). The extracted outlines can be imported into a commercial software package (such as the often mentioned in this blog CityEngine) and then further manipulated.

This is the link to the journal describing the work.

Kinect used for 3D urban modelling

It appears that the possibilities of using Microsoft's Kinect are really capturing many users' imaginations, prompting the emergence of a variety of cool experimentations with it, with most of them of course related to gaming (which in fact I may have to come back to for a post or two in the future).

One of the most amazing non-gaming ones however is the one by Martin Szarski who strapped the device to his car, connected it to his laptop and a Nexus One mobile phone and thusly recorded a point cloud of the car's journey. The results are very impressive considering the modest equipment used and according to Szarski could been more accurate had a phone with a gyroscope been used. For more details of this great "home-made" 3D urban modelling experiment check out the link here.

New city-building game RamaCity

The Hamburg-based developer Bigpoint is now adding a new social game to their string of titles (Farmerama, ZooMumba and Ponyrama) called RamaCity. This game will be free and browser-based and launched in Spring 2011. During the game, the ambitious urban planner will be called upon to turn small towns and cities into expansive metropolises, tackling more than the typical challenges as he/she can also interact with the cities of other players in a variety of imaginative ways.

Always interested to see virtual cities represented in games in such a manner and moreso in RamaCity's case, as it tackles the visualization aspect of the urban models in a (slight, yet noticeable) cartoon-shaded representation.

More about the upcoming game here, looking forward to its release date.

Acquisition of PixelActive by Navteq

PixelActive, the California-based company which I have blogged about before, particularly in terms of their Cityscape 3D urban modelling application, has now been acquired by Navteq (also another company mentioned several times in this blog, similarly with a strong interest in 3D urban navigation).

With founding members of PixelActive staying in the company and the links between Navteq and Nokia the push towards 3D urban navigation to compliment/replace maps is apparent, hopefully the expertise of PixelActive will further accelerate this.

CityEngine and National Geographic Megacities

For the recent National Geographic Asia's "Megacities" episode Worlds Away Productions was tasked with creating a 3D model of the city of Kaohsiung in Taiwan. This was achieved using an application I have blogged about many times before, Procedural's CityEngine.

As can be seen in the vid above, the results are impressive in terms of not only quality but also size/scale. The team has pointed out post-project that the CityEngine lent itself greatly to the tight production schedule (they had 4 weeks to complete the project) which involved the generation of 385 square kilometers.