I have a client that wants to show a proposed bus lane down the middle of a major street in our city and I want to replicate the city scape to create an animation fly over of how the bus lane would look running its course.
My problem is how to create the cityscape so it is proportionally accurate?
Is this a matter of contacting city hall and asking if they have CAD files of the inner city or do I do it myself via taking pictures and guessing?
Try and get cad files (unlikely) or a copy of the city plans… would be a photo copy most liekly.. then scan them in and away you go. Just judges the heights visually i would say.
Often there are companies who build up 3d models of cities for similar purposes.
I know that here in Canberra, Australia there is a company with a completely 3d model of canberra.. or atleast the city area.
You could also find out if any companies have carried out a LIDAR scan of the city in question, which would give you the heights of all the buildings and surrounding landscape. In the UK, most of the major cities have been scanned, and data for 1kmsq costs around £200. It produces a rather dense, messy mesh when you get it into max, but with that and a combination of city plans and photos, you should be able to achieve what you want.
It was called pixeldust, and yes, it has disappeared from the face of the earth.
I havent had any luck at all using mokey, in fact it looks like it’s too easy, but when u try some mildly complex shots, it’s easier to pick some pop tarts, high caffeine drinks and spend some hours rotoscoping.
What are the chances that google earth has a 3d model of that area? I know it has some box shapes for the buildings in some major cities like nyc so it might give you some scale reference for the area you need - someone else had a plugin to import 3d models from google earth so you could in theory rip them direct from it as a base.
back OFF track, i used mokey in a couple of complex shots (swinging camera AND swinging lady hanging from a tie-knot ina forest) and it worked very well for a first approximation, also considering the PAL resolution and the absence of a back plate.
It did take me more than what’s advertised, though, to do a passable job of it
As for houses, probably the nicer thing is getting a few aerial shots (commercial ones, if you can find them) and a few pictures of the main path’s buildings.
Then model up boxes, texture them and add small ledges and insets on top of it for the main part at eye level, and leave the rest with the aerial photos stuck on top (especially if you see it from a bird’s point of view).
It’s a lot of work, though, if the route’s long.
we are currently doing this sort of thing to several city blocks of kansas city. We sent the intern to take photos of facades, and map them onto geometry we modelled from the textures. Its mostly just massing type of stuff, but for buildings that are closer to the camera, ledges and other stuff was added to the simple ‘box’ geometry.
This sounds strange but try the public library. I was told by a librarian that I know that they now have some of this stuff at the Sacramento Library. Might be hit and miss finding someone who knows where to find this stuff.
