How to go about building a city in Maya?

[duncandes]

Make a plane with lot of details, then random select it, and extrude face few times.. ;-)

[stallion151]

you can use the building brush in Maya 5.

Good for distant buildings.

[koinu]

Build the building in the distance as cubes extruded from the plane and textuer them, the up close one's you might want to cut up with tools and then texture:thumbsup:

[neofg]

There's a plugin for 3DS but 4 Maya I don't think...
If u know 3ds u can start project and then export...
Yeah! Bad answer...

[Guillermo]

There's a plugin for 3DS but 4 Maya I don't think...
If u know 3ds u can start project and then export...
Yeah! Bad answer...
Hei! I want your avatar!!!
What plug-in is that? I would really be interested on it ;)

[Prodygy]

Ya! I remember a plugin for Max called "Greeble"...
But i remember that, in this forum, some times ago, a member spoke about new technical to produce a city starting from texture or similar...

[antweiler]

download the bonustools from the alias website. there is a script called "geometry paint".
a bit cryptical to use, but very powerful for distributing, then modifying lots of geometry (houses, etc..)

[Ehanson]

I specialize in digital cityscapes in feature film and will be releasing 3 DVDs through Gnomon in early January on the topic. They are entitled:

The Techniques of Digital Sets: Urban Environments-

Vol 1: Design, Modeling, and Lighting
Vol 2: Lighting and Texturing
Vol 3: Rendering and Compositing

Soon after I will release a few more on natural environments. They should help an artist thru navigating projects that can easily go astray from erroneous approaches. It's a lot to cover in 6 hours, though!

[AndrewHwang]

http://www.nerfsafetysquid.com/mel.htm

this guy is an amazing script writer, he has a script where it randomly generates building based upon rgb values that the user lays out, if you use this please give all credit to Dan Neufeldt

[Bonedaddy]

Hey there Eric. Long time no see. :) Looking forward to the Gnomon stuff.

As for your question, I'd say simplify as much as you can. Anything as complex as what you're talking about should either be modeled procedurally or cheated as much as possible. Storyboard your shots, and if you can get away with matte paintings, or buildings on cards (a la Moulin Rouge), or Paint Effects, do so. Do whatever you can juggle/modify with the least hassle. I worked on the jungle sequence in Sky Captain, and while it was visually very complex, it was mostly matte paintings, with some 3d objects up close to camera when needed.

If you're hellbent on going 3d, however, you'll have your work cut out for you. We've actually built an entire city for the movie I'm on now. It is supposed to have a very specific look, so procedural approaches were going to be difficult. To get the look right, one of the guys went on a several-week spree shooting photos of buildings specifically to model. He scripted an entire system around photogrammetry, and trained a couple of us to use it. We basically mapped photos to primitive geometry for each building, and made a library of around 90 skyscrapers... for 2 shots. This took a team of 3 people around 6 solid weeks of modeling, texturing, modeling, texturing... it got very old, very fast. It also gave us neverending headaches on corraling the damn thing... which buildings did we not have info for the rear side? Which buildings did we not have roof textures for? Which buildings have shadows cast on them from other buildings? Etc.

Long-winded answer, but... um, basically, cheat. Building an entire CG city (a good one, at least) is way too much for one person without any LIDAR scans.

[neofg]

What plug-in is that? I would really be interested on it ;)
I'don't remember now... Attend that I look at home and I answer u!

[pixel mixer]

last month i finished a commercial that required building a city. so we implemented a few scripts based on instancing using patricles. it's quite easy.

here are some snapshots of the city.
http://www.digitalfx.ro/images/city01.gif
http://www.digitalfx.ro/images/particle_city01.gif
http://www.digitalfx.ro/images/city_scape.gif

all is done procedurally. we can control building size and density, we can draw a map of the city and put buildings in the areas we need and keep the streets clean, we can rotate the buildings based on a user defined map (paintable). scaling and shifting the buildings is done procedurally also. actually the whole city can be controlled procedurally. we had a ~150 building base that we instanced using particles. the nice thing about is that since we can make particles stick to the surface we can also animate it so turning a city into a living thing is not very complicated.

the method can be further enhanced to deal with neighbours, building styles, bridges, people, cars etc. and it's fun!

[neofg]

last month i finished a commercial that required building a city. so we implemented a few scripts based on instancing using patricles. it's quite easy.

here are some snapshots of the city.
http://www.digitalfx.ro/images/city01.gif
http://www.digitalfx.ro/images/particle_city01.gif
http://www.digitalfx.ro/images/city_scape.gif

all is done procedurally. we can control building size and density, we can draw a map of the city and put buildings in the areas we need and keep the streets clean, we can rotate the buildings based on a user defined map (paintable). scaling and shifting the buildings is done procedurally also. actually the whole city can be controlled procedurally. we had a ~150 building base that we instanced using particles. the nice thing about is that since we can make particles stick to the surface we can also animate it so turning a city into a living thing is not very complicated.

the method can be further enhanced to deal with neighbours, building styles, bridges, people, cars etc. and it's fun!That's a great work...
Is there something that we can use in this script?
Tks...

[pixel mixer]

these are our inhouse tools. when we will decide to make these tools public we will anounce it on cgtalk for sure.

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