Hello everyone! I have a little question. I need to build a city level. With hi rise buildings, much of lites, etc. So, how is better to create buildings. To build each building in 3d tool, or create buildings from modules?
Little description. Buildings will be very hi. Like in “Blade Runner” or “Johnny Mnemonic”. This is cyberpunk style, so you can imagine size of level and buildings. In some of them player can enter, and walk throw…
Well, the fastest way, without using some sort of a script setup, is the block the whole city itself out with primative shapes, and then detail it down from there, you can decide what buildings are relevant enough that people will need to go inside them, and put interior stuff in those if thats how interactive it needs to be, otherwise just shape the outside of the city. By blocking it out first, you also insure the scale is how you want it.
I’m quite curious about this myself. I have seen some city builders before but what is the point of having a city with 5 million polygons? Sure, with Unity’s occlusion culling that might not be THAT much of a problem if everything is cut into tiny bits but then again, what is the sense in creating a vast metropolis in 60 seconds and then spending 5 days breaking the millions of polygons into usable segments?
The way I look at it, there is no getting around it: Design your blocks, design your buildings, start with number 1 and build them one by one till you are done… so if anyone else has any great ideas, please do share…
Build a constructor set of individual pieces which can be recombined in various compositions to create different buildings.
This has the advantage of making your design seem homogeneous (something that ‘future cities’ have in common - all of the architecture matches a singular aesthetic), as well as providing you exponential variation with each new constructor piece you create.
Additionally, you can create LODs for each piece, for distant buildings.
as faultymoose said, you’re better of going modular with it.I wouldn’t go so far as creating simple construction pieces (windows, wall types, etc) but some modularity would prove useful in the long run (per floor for example). If you do go this way, you could even generate slight variations in Awake based on simple coupling rules.
Modular, is great. Some time ago (not so far), i already tried to create modular buildnig. I’ve created 1st floor corner, walls (2 types) and 2++ floors with windows. After creating 25 floors building i have 500+ draw calls… and i think this is not very good. So… i have no ideas how to use this method. Is anybody know the solution of this problem?
P.S. Combine script is not working, because after merging it has 65000+ triangles, that Unity does not support (
Selectively combine meshes so you get less than 65000 tris (could be based on building height) or make them slightly lower poly. Clever use of LOD and mesh combine/ batching and texture atlases should eventually do it. Either way, it’s a pretty big undertaking and it’s probably not going to be easy.
One more question. How to create realistic buildings and roads placement? At this moment my “city” looks like chaotic placed buildings with bridges. No city look (
Here is web player. Take a look.
Dont know how to put web player. Just download to any folder and run html file.
I’d be more inclined to make my modular pieces one third to one quarter of the height of a building. So the average building would be built from only 3 or 4 modular tower sections. It’s easier, allows you more design control in the mesh phase, and is just less logistically terrifying.
Even if you stick to cartesian coordinates for rotation of building segments around the y-axis only, that gives you 4 visible variations for every modular segment (north, south, east, and west facing). Introduce some added variety by randomly (but uniformly) scaling in <x,z>.
Let’s say you built 8 different building segments. That’d give you a total of 32768 possible 3-segment buildings, and 1048576 possible 4-segment buildings.
Take a look at the concept art you posted: There’s really not much variety in those buildings. All you’d need is subtle variety to create a convincing (yet aesthetically pleasing) metropolis.
Added bonus: It’s a futuristic setting. People will be far less picky about visual accuracy.
On a less serious note, you guys made me write a simple script for building stacking. It doesn’t handle block rotation yet but that should be trivial (har har). If one’s careful with the module design, it should spit out interesting combos.
P.S:
Created in 20 minutes (assets included) and thus really not made for production.
** uses the regular CombineChildren (I’ve only made some minor modifications to it)
*** ads a box collider to the resulting mesh (or multiple box colliders for every generated mesh if you are using more than 1 material)
**** Does not clean-up after itself and does not do any sanity checks
I’m attempting to do this now, leveraging some architectural education!
I’ve decided to create two different module sets and then fade them in and out of my city to create districts. Major modules are one story,then large structure, then assets.
Thanx for yours assistance. But, i am not programmer, and creating simple generator is to hard for me. But i can draw and create models, because i am CG artist, so, i decided to use part of Tokio streets, as my city layout. Just know, that cyberpunk is often referred to Eastern culture, ninjas and the like, which means that Tokyo could not be better suited.
Later will show u what i have )))
Here si webplayer of OLD city, for those, who not seen it yet.
