[grassynoel]

Hi All.


I have started playing with outer city buidongs by dusting off Greeble in max. I first cut the strets out using procutter setting the remaining slices to be quad meshed. This gives you nice quads running parallel to the streets. I them Greebled it all and set each "building" a unique material ID by script. I clipped about 20 or so building tops and sides from a photgraph and mapped them onto the random ID'ed boxes. It needs work but I think it has promise.




Glenn

http://www.glennmelenhorst.com

[jeremy]

This looks quality how long did it take you?

Can you quickly run through the process to a non greeble man? I'm a Maya user myself.

many thanks

[jeremy]

Glenn,

Just found a load of stuff online - pretty cool - how much control do you
have over the appearance? Would something like z-brush be quicker
and less hit and miss?

thanks

[grassynoel]

I only spent a few hours on it between meetings today. I hope to polish it up a lot, using google maps to plan out a propper city and add iconic buildings/ bridges etc.

Here's a small workflow tut.

















Glenn

[Justin Atkinson]

Hi Glen, thats top!

I have been trying the same thing in a way...

Here's something similar that I have been working on too. It's designed only for night shots and includes traffic.

The process is a lot simpler.
Basic geometry and luminance maps for nigh-time only and at this distance.

Cinema 4D

[grassynoel]

That's pretty effective. Are you running your cars around as mesh or ilumination maps on the roads?

What I'd like to get to is a fairly parametric result that can be reworked by changing the base road layouts. I've also been talking to our lead TD about controling height and density of buildings by a luminance map.

Fun fun fun

Glenn

[Justin Atkinson]

Cheers Glenn - with a little extra push in post it works okay, it's still a little WIP

Yep..The cars are luminance maps again animated along the surface of the road poly's. No lights in here at all and just textures and GI.

It's surprising how little structure detail appears on camera at this distance, it's usually just lights and dots. I am working on a more detailed version for the near distance.



I'm now trying to think how I can id the blocks in c4d as you did. It really works well with the textures, in close up my blocks have no details at all just a blinn shader with some random diffusion.

The ideal situation would we to have all this controllable. I'm working on some big wide nightime shots that stretch off into the distance, thats why I made this kit. But placing each tile has to be done by hand so to speak..

[jeremy]

Thanks for the breakdown Glenn, that's pretty impressive.

[Defonten]

grassynoel.

Amazing work! Could you please explain how did you textured them all correctly? A short breakdown\tut on this one would be much much appreciated also as I didn't get the part with assigning unique IDs to each box's tops and sides. Of course having this script would be great but even a short breakdown of it would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance and again - awesome work!

[grassynoel]

Originally Posted by Defonten

grassynoel.

Amazing work! Could you please explain how did you textured them all correctly? A short breakdown\tut on this one would be much much appreciated also as I didn't get the part with assigning unique IDs to each box's tops and sides. Of course having this script would be great but even a short breakdown of it would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance and again - awesome work!

That's the tricky part.
One of the guys (our lead TD here at Iloura) wrote a simple script to do it. I'll check with him to see if he'll share it. Basically, greeble can select the top faces of the boxes it creates. I passed that selection up to an edit poly and Grant's script basically expanded the selection set by one poly which selects the entire box/building. His script then assigned a random ID to the buildings (ID's 1-50) and a separate random ID to the roofs (51-100).

Then I made a multi-sub material using 50 slots for building sides and the next 50 slots for roofs and assigned that one material to the mesh. Setting up the material was a bit manual and tedious but in the end it seems to work okay. I'd like to be able to control the height of the builldings by a greyscale map to create city enters and also control the density with another. I woull also like to scatter water towers and air con etc on top of the buildings too which should be fairly simple to do with scatter.

I'll see if Grant has time to help me out. :)

A variation on the render- daylight~