Building a scalable complex 3D city

[pg1]

Anyone got any suggestions how they would do this?

I have worked on a fair few master plan size animations but this is a lot more complex.
I know you could use city engine but I need it to happen in 3dsmax.

Several xref scenes containing forest Pro objects and or vray proxies.
Am thinking .Tx textures although haven't used them before.

Terrain xref. Initially could be just meshed point cloud that you add more and more detail to.
Trees cars and people and Street scape could be forest objects across the whole city, all in one xref. Or possibly split them each to separate xref as they grow.
Procedural materials where possible, am looking into substance to help with this.
Am also looking at lodding and substitute modifier.

The harder part is how to handle lots of unique objects, buildings and more detail terrain.
Also handling updates across several years of the models life and dividing the city into parts.

I tried instancing 5000 boxes and then instancing that to see what would happen and not surprisingly max died

Any suggestions about instances vs attaching and collapsing.

Wondering how far you could take it in the of scalable controllable detail.

[mitviz]

Anyone got any suggestions how they would do this?

I have worked on a fair few master plan size animations but this is a lot more complex.
I know you could use city engine but I need it to happen in 3dsmax.

Several xref scenes containing forest Pro objects and or vray proxies.
Am thinking .Tx textures although haven't used them before.

Terrain xref. Initially could be just meshed point cloud that you add more and more detail to.
Trees cars and people and Street scape could be forest objects across the whole city, all in one xref. Or possibly split them each to separate xref as they grow.
Procedural materials where possible, am looking into substance to help with this.
Am also looking at lodding and substitute modifier.

The harder part is how to handle lots of unique objects, buildings and more detail terrain.
Also handling updates across several years of the models life and dividing the city into parts.

I tried instancing 5000 boxes and then instancing that to see what would happen and not surprisingly max died

Any suggestions about instances vs attaching and collapsing.

Wondering how far you could take it in the of scalable controllable detail.

ghost town is great

[pg1]

I have had a look at ghostown. Really awesome idea but last I checked Kilad was no longer really updating it.
Not sure if ghostown would do what I am try to do anyway though.

In the new place that I work we have a proprietry real time render engine that handles geo referenced paging data sets reasonably well.
This allows up to have a very large game world and move between different levels of detail through lod (level of detail) that swaps out a model at an appropriate level of detail.

Far away a plane with an ECW (google map) and as you zoom in it loads in the revelant tile at the right lod level.

We do most of our work in 3dsmax and as we spend all our time in that software was hoping to be able to reproduce this type of set up in max.
At the moment all of our 3dsmax files are like little jigsaw pieces to view them all together you have to jump out use our real time engine.
Which is fine but life would be a lot easier if we could create this in max and then export to engine.

Am really curious about how you could build a city of say 5 million people and manage it in 3dsmax.

First off there is world scale issues but I think if your main scene is in kms, and that holds various xrefs that make up your city you would be fine.
Then the scale in the xref could in metres. Forest pro to do trees and place cars across the whole city to keep instancing.

Will try and build something over Easter if I get time but with a 3 month old daughter time is a rare thing these days !

[mitviz]

I have had a look at ghostown. Really awesome idea but last I checked Kilad was no longer really updating it.
Not sure if ghostown would do what I am try to do anyway though.

In the new place that I work we have a proprietry real time render engine that handles geo referenced paging data sets reasonably well.
This allows up to have a very large game world and move between different levels of detail through lod (level of detail) that swaps out a model at an appropriate level of detail.

Far away a plane with an ECW (google map) and as you zoom in it loads in the revelant tile at the right lod level.

We do most of our work in 3dsmax and as we spend all our time in that software was hoping to be able to reproduce this type of set up in max.
At the moment all of our 3dsmax files are like little jigsaw pieces to view them all together you have to jump out use our real time engine.
Which is fine but life would be a lot easier if we could create this in max and then export to engine.

Am really curious about how you could build a city of say 5 million people and manage it in 3dsmax.

First off there is world scale issues but I think if your main scene is in kms, and that holds various xrefs that make up your city you would be fine.
Then the scale in the xref could in metres. Forest pro to do trees and place cars across the whole city to keep instancing.

Will try and build something over Easter if I get time but with a 3 month old daughter time is a rare thing these days !

ok i have a license, i used it late last year and it was being update, i will login now to check, the new ghost town is nothing like the last everything is created with nodes, will share with you a screenshot of something

[mitviz]

ok just checked, its being updated but you wont have access until you pay him that 90 usd or euros idk for the software, here is a shots of something recently he updated some shots also of some work i did not long ago with it, i had alot more small areas made from maps of different cities but sure now where i put them but they were really great to use

[pg1]

Thanks MitviZ will definitely check it out.

[pg1]

I know you can take objects out of forest pro.
Anyone know if you can get them back in again?

Also need to check how it works with lodding in 3dmax.
i.e. a ground plane with a car on it , if the mesh gets more detail will the car move with the surface.

[Ihno]

Ghost town helps alot. But its still a very big task.
I'm on something similar at the moment. And I think the pipeline is everything. Take your time to create a material library which is present in both engines (Max and your real time engine).
And find a way to directly translate them without putting more effort on that, than doing it once. The process might be different from engine to engine.
Know your enemy Make performance tests on your target device as soon as you can. Built a singe block and copy it as often as you'd do it later with many. Balance the graphic settings to what you'd want to have and optimize the scene in any direction till it reaches your target frame rate. Think about that very well and define some guidelines for max poly count, obj count, material complexity and texture size.
Then start to build more and more blocks.
Also, learn everything about the light baking capabilities, restrictions and requirements of your target engine. That knowledge can make a huge difference for the final quality.
And might force you to even put more effort in the pipeline. Since often you'd need special uv's like:
Is contained within the [0,1]x[0,1] space
Has no overlapping faces.
Has low angle distortion, that is deviation of angles in UVs and in source geometry.
Has low area distortion, that is, relative scale of triangles is mostly preserved, unless you really want some areas to have bigger Lightmap Resolution.
Has enough margin between individual patches.


I use rail clone alot by the way. And I use ghost town to layout the blocks and build some kind of 3d reference.

[pg1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvSBAEXr8z4
Forest pro is awesome.
Can now making a lod for the terrain put it in a forest as a ground surface.
Have lodding trees put them in a forest, put the trees forest object on the surface of the ground forest and we are good to go.
This way the ground starts with a flat plane with some very low detail trees and as you move closer and the ground changes height the trees move with the surface.
Can scatter cars, trees, signage, people, even buildings.

Can instantiate the objects out of the forest at export.
If I display in point cloud mode the scene is still very quick.

Although at some point the buildings would go from boxes, to peaked roof, to actually become unique building... not sure how you can swap them out to a unique building.

Hey Ihno, the materials are another problem.
We have 2 outputs from this model, real time and vray.
At the moment our shader system works ok. Render it uses vray, export it discards the vray side of the shader and use the realtime engine shader.
The realtime engine we use (for the moment) has no real material editing options, just a tiling diffuse map, normal etc.

Any of the complex shading network we build for vray, procedurals, composite/mix map etc which looks awesome is dumped.
Am currently looking at substance designer to see if it could bridge the gap.

Am going to sit with the realtime developers over the coming months to define the pipeline more.
They have not really had anyone design a direct translation from 3dsmax to the realtime. Its more like a whole bunch of non-connected parts on the 3dsmax side.

Couldn't agree more about pipeline. Now if only I can get more time in my day! Sleep who needs it

I want a scenario where if change it at all, colour, size etc in either 3ds or in real time it is reflected in both.
Renders looking great at the highest level in vray and outputs to the correct lod level for the realtime.