CityScape (city creator) Demo model in Unity

Community Showcases
1

After making some search in the forum I didn’t found nothing about this.

http://pixelactive3d.com/Products/CityScape/

The video gives a very good impression of how it works.

It’s a program for city creation, there is a free demo but it lacks of some functions like exporting and limited libraries. I tried the demo (unfortunately only for windows) and it runs very well.

Anyway I found it pretty impressive so I downloaded a demo model they have in the web, it’s in collada format and I imported in Cinema4D R11.

At first it was a complete mess because it includes 3 LOD for each element resulting in several thousands of objects and hundreds of textures (in dds format), but after cleaning I was capable of isolate the lowpoly model and textures. This is not a problem if, as they say, you can export LODs separatedly.

So, this is the result in Unity (a little heavy 4,5 Mb, as I didn’t make optimization and activated realtime shadows).

http://nemdrive.com/Demos/Pixelactive/

One thing I couldn’t find is the price, maybe you need to contact them for that, if anyone get the info, please post it.

2

Oh man, this is incredible. The city looks cool and fast togehter. Great stuff.

Edit: I download the demo and i can`t install this programm. Hmm…

3

Firstly, it’s Windows only, didn’t you read the System Requirements?

Secondly, can you please cut it out with the freaking shadows? They ruin an otherwise fine framerate on my crappy mac mini. (I’m getting one of the new ones soon.) It’s really annoying, when people post webplayers without optimization, or even a quality option. Seriously. Just because it runs fine on your higher end mac, doesn’t mean it’ll run fine on my bottom line mac. Sorry to ruin your nice little fantasy :sarcasm:

I still prefer CityEngine, much better, and Linux! Very expensive, but worth it, I hope.

Looks nice, but I’m going with CityEngine, any thoughts (I’m buying it when I can afford it, which Isn’t NOW)?

4

That’s a really sweet technology. I ended up grabbing the demo to play around with it at work (shhh!).

What’s with the nasty attitude? He was sharing something neat that he threw together. There’s no expectation or obligation for an optimized final product.

5

Agree, really sweet and works without a prob here :slight_smile:

But the trees seem to have a bit of problems.

6

@Dakta: I test it on my Windows XP PC and it can`t start the install. Pentium Dual Core with 3 GHz and 3 GB Memory and 320 GB Harddisk and a ATI 4750 with 1 GB Memory.

7

This is absolutely incredible… i really can’t get over how cool that is!

8

Uhm… Alec: broken sig

Train: sorry, no help here. I can’t fix Windows errors like that.

defmech: I see a lot of demos here with useless shadows, just sucking up CPUs on my crappy machine. It gets really annoying, as well as not being very difficult to fix (two options, simple tidbit of code, or not having them at all). Sorry to be rude. I just get annoyed at simple things that people are too lazy/whatever to fix. Like leaving your clothes on the bathroom floor after you shower. Can’t you just pick them up already?!?!?!?! (Just a random example, nobody here is an offender that I know of [please don’t be ;)] )

Yes, I know this thing is awesome, but CityEngine is more so.

9

broken sig?

10

Sorry, Avatar. Not a sig, it’s your avatar, dude. It’s the blue.white question.

11

mmmm, don’t care really :stuck_out_tongue:

12

For Dakta:

I’m so sorry the demo doesn’t run smoothly in your mac mini, I understand your frustration and that’s not my intention to ruin your experience.

My only goal is to share the info I found and demostrate that it can be useful. Anyway Unity is intended for games not only oriented to low end machines but high end ones too, and Unity is capable of realtime shadows, so Why I can not use it?.

In the world of gamers people is spending +300$ in graphic cards for the last titles in the market and although I think Unity is not Unreal or Crysis, it can do great things, so some of my demos are pushing the limits for some machines.

About CityEngine I think it’s a great solution but the price is a little too high (7000$ if I’m not wrong) and was thinking if CityScape has a lower price it can be a good alternative (and soon will be a Windows version of Unity, so no problem with Windows programs).

Anyway here you have a version of the demo without shadows:

http://nemdrive.com/Demos/Pixelactive/NoShadow/

But please, don’t hurt me if it doesn’t run in your machine.

13

Shadows at no point are done on your cpu at all.
They are purely on GPU, where a CPU to DVI adapter like an intel means bye bye

14

Thank you for sharing this. City Engine is a great tool once you master it, but it costs so much money.

15

if I may ask, ikiman… how did/what did you export from cityscape to import into unity, I’m not able to run the demo (no windows) but I’m curious. Was it a lot of work to get the models/textures working in Unity?

Thanks for sharing the info!

Is this app in release yet, wonder why they don’t have a price anywhere on the site…

16

@Dakta: You really should calm down. It’s not the first time you get rude or even mean (I’m talking about the post on Digital Molecular Matter). If you have a problem with the framerate, just ask nicely or let it go. It’s not the end of the world if you can’t run it properly. You have to realise that most of use here have a job and don’t necessarily have the time to optimize the things we just want to share with people.

@ikiman: Thanks alot for sharing this infos/webplayer! I wasn’t aware of the app and it seems a very nice alternative to CityEngine, especially if it’s cheaper.
I think I might need it for the game I’m working on. I’ll probably ask them the price of the app and post it here if they allow me to.

17

It’s a very cool app. To “my” recollection, I think the price is high… and by high I mean 5 digits. I’ll look around some to make sure though so don’t quote me on that.

also, your demo ran smooth for me; was very interesting.

18

That’s really cool. With some effort and polish you could make a nice indie GTA clone or something.

As a funny side note, I drove up onto your highway and when I reached the edge I couldn’t help but think of the end of Dellamorte Dellamore.

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19

Well, but the car rides rather slow. Why is it? Big city model, or such options for the car?
Is it simple to export the model from CityScape to Unity and how do you do this?

20

Well, I have some bad news and good news about this.

Bad news first.
After some research in the web I found a forum where someone contacted Pixelactive about the price and the answer was … 29000$ (maybe that’s the reason why they don’t publish the price in the web), I think it’s close to reality due to the program capabilities.:frowning:

But not all lost, I found another one (nothing comparable to CityScape, nor to make cities but very interesting).I’ll comment at the end of this post.

You need a graphic card with “Shader Model 3.0 or better”, this can be the reason.

Actually I didn’t export from cityscape, I only have de demo and exporting is not allowwed. What you see is a model they made and I downloaded from here (look at the bottom of the page for ColladaSample.zip):

http://pixelactive3d.com/Products/CityScape/?FeatureId=ImportExport

This model come with 3 LODs (level of detail) and it took me sometime to extract the lowpoly one, then it was a snap to get into Unity.

The car is a Citroën 2CV and it was not intended for racing. Yes it’s intentionally slow to resemble the actual one. My intention here was to show the scenery, not the car, so going slowly you can appreciate better the details.

And now the good news.

As I said I found something interesting, of course nothing to do with CityScape or CityEngine, nor the price.

Sorry, but once again only for Windows:

The price is 79.95 Australian Dollar (About 40€). At first it’s intended to make mods for Richard Burns Rally and Rfactor, but it can export in DirectX format too so you’ll need something like Polytrans to manage it. I don’t know about Max and Maya and other 3d packages capabilities for importing DirectX models, if you know about another solution please post.

I purchased the program and it performs quite well. Creating tracks and placing props is very easy as well as texturing. Really it worth’s a look, and better than this, it runs in Vmware Fusion.