3D Cities for Falcon…
-
About buildings density it can be controlled by both ways.
1. Best is zoning. This is a superb cityengine feature. U set zones by colors. A simple png with basic colors covering the build area. On those zones u can set variables like density or buildings style. Like blue color flat roof high buildings. Red low height v shaped roofs and brown for high v shaped roofs.
2. By rules by just declaring open space or sidewalks to be larger or if u use the whole lot (lot = building area).About one feature xxx buildings. First u can set only smoke from falcon editor or burn and leave it or nothing like the bomb drops, explodes but buildinds are uneffectef just as the city tiles that falcon has now. Doesnt happen anything when a bomb drops on a city tile. So i really dont understand the question if they explode, and are better than just flat tiles. U can create gaps between cityengine buildings and from falcon editor place falcon features which are one building with damaged and destroyed models.
Second you can get the cityengine model and export each building as a unique feature. Create damaged & destroyed models. Very easy with rayfire plugin for 3ds max.
Then import one by one in Falcon.
Third u can create new generic city tiles or current ones and buildings from city engine. Those buildings blocks can be generic as the city tiles are. So create xxx city blocks for those xxx city tiles.What we actually need help from 3ds max gurus is the texturing. As clearly shown by Nuno Santos pictures the texture has reapetiness of same facade (walls) in different sizes. So if same wall is used in 20 buildings it takes 20times more texture area instead of just once.
Does anyone know how to solve this?
This will result in higher resution textures and the final outcome will be breathtaking.
@Nuno all those years i gatheted many rules. I’ll pass them to you along with some tutotials and guides i have found.
I’m jealus of your result, super happy that you found the way and sad i dont have the free time to work together and blow it up.
Count me in on your side and i’ll share anything i have with you and cant be done via this forum.
For now its just unbeleavable what is achieved here.
sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk
-
(Ground crew officers discussing): Oh crap, did we loaded a mark 82, a Hades or a b61 on that mau??!!
lol
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/37/86/e2/3786e2806afa8c5a6fc20f41f9cb6a17.jpg
So… What you want to do:
1- VFR flight simulator? (you already have FSX, P3D)
2- Or combat simulator? -
More dificult ways to accomplish your mission when you fly falcon flight combat sim.
sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk
-
-
Hi guys,
it’s a great project but i think about that- analyse power of nvram
- optimize vertex with directX
- chose power cpu ou power gnu
best regards
sf
Well one building at a time ??? that ain’t gonna work… why one city will take more than one year to finish… One real city block (about 15 buildings) Some math here: one small city will have >1.000 buildings… so LOL u get it… non doable.
Another thought is this…at least one block = one building or one object… and lot’s of parks with grass, roads thicker than usual to reduce number of buildings. Also not all cities with such detail…
I get u Amraam but u see this goes to a project like the never ending story… than photoreal buildings and than project dead… lol
Now about the hitbox I can’t do anything on this… what we can do is predefine some low alt buildings as military targets inside (maybe not inside but at the city boundaries and hit only those…) also TV-Radio buildings should be City targets… that way it will be ok. Also the correct should be that bombs will not be able to pass through the buildings as they will do now…
Also troops and vehicles also shouldn’t pass through buildings as they are not there… but this is also code - path manipulation. For now that is why we should import and respect falcon paths… that way we will see troops pass through a town… but we will be able to lock them? the buildings will not block the radar? also for moving targets if I release and they stop behind a building the bomb will pass through the building?the problem will be if we deploy units inside the city than they will be vehicles inside the building making tgp undoable… In the future maybe some more detailed paths inside the city and a way to have the units movement could result in a realistic solution…
Are they issues that can be fixed in the future?
-
Hi guys,
it’s a great project but i think about that- analyse power of nvram
- optimize vertex with directX
- chose power cpu ou power gnu
best regards
sf
1. We dont have a pro testbed. So we try eachother and try to keep it as low poly as posible. Its boxes afterall. And if ur hw can cope with it ok. If not sorry.
2. Can u provide more info?
3. Sorry but i cant understand what u mean. Could u rephrase or be detailed please?In general about performance the issue is to be at a poly level so that it works in LE and FE. Lodeditor Falconeditor.
Also creating tailormade rules in Cityengine is the way. Hard but will leave a legacy and super minimize garbage and polygons.
Example now with some rules when i cleared not viewed polys i ended up with 1/3 or 1/5 of polygons from the initial model. Example floors, cityengine creates them and exports them. We dont want them as the falcon gfx engine drops to its knees.
Another is windows. If u export them and set LOD1 param in detail… [emoji38] even 3dsmax has issues.Edit: to add for night tiles u can create a generic tileset and use the same for all cities. Only roads will be shown lighted.
sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk
-
@Nuno all those years i gatheted many rules. I’ll pass them to you along with some tutotials and guides i have found.
I’m jealus of your result, super happy that you found the way and sad i dont have the free time to work together and blow it up.
Count me in on your side and i’ll share anything i have with you and cant be done via this forum.
For now its just unbeleavable what is achieved here.
sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk
Thank you Arty!
I really appreciate your vote of confidence and your will to take this road as further as possible, mate!
-
Only practical way to do such things in Falcon will be Autogen in the future. That will be faster (as it’ll be batched/instanced by the engine, like e.g the trees are now).
Eye candy or no eye candy, people may want full damage like real objects, but I seriously think that isn’t so practical and TBH not that important actually (What will be the benefit of having city buildings to count?). Even if you will tell me that we should have some indication about civilian bombing as a kind of court martial, then even for that I believe we can find some solution without using real objects.
-
Autogen was mentioned years ago.
Till now it’s done only for trees, and it looks awesome!!!
For the future since we don’t have something in hand, we do whatever we want - like - believe.
Unless u mean that buildings autogen in Falcon is near by so don’t bother and waste our time and focus on something else. This would be valuable info for us.The process Nuno Santos followed and I mention in this thread is based on autogen. You don’t build those one by one.
you set the base layers.
you get the data, most probably OSM
you select one or a few rules. You set the params on those rules and you select generate.
And Voila you have a city infront of you in a few seconds depending on your pc horse power.
Then u fine tune and u export to 3dsmax.The basic concept is this.
I’m sure Falcon autogen will be easier if it will be following the doctrine from trees. But maybe less variant or limited.
With Cityengine and large city blocks you have more control… you can end the variation where you want, you can plant real buildings that you can find for free in the internet as landmarks.
Civil bombing well yeap. Plant some high assets scattered inside the city blocks and have the guys go surgical bombing… It’s a trend nowadays and the bombing is done there…
With OSM yes the building will be where it is now in real life. Like television, comms, Army unit, etc and it will be and the surrounding as they are in real or very close. -
As much as i want to see more 3D buildings in BMS … what will happen with ground forces standing or moving thru them?
Trees are a very small object so movers in forrests aren’t the big problem. But in cities they will be.
-
Sure Arty, I’m not saying that you should do something different from what you are doing (Which I very much like BTW, it’s looking good and much better than trying to create object for every strcuture :)). Also The fact that you guys found a way to pull data from OSM, that very nice.
I already had some very short checking of OSM and on how X-PLANE is pulling data from there, and while I don’t expect to get to X-PLANE level, I do expect to be somewhere in the ball park.
(But that said, I can’t even start looking at Autogen anything because I have some other related PITA that must be done first and which I struggle with for long time now :()
-
As far as movers. The city builder can take in to account the paths that Falcon uses. So movers will pass through the roads and not inside the buildings.
Still once they are ordered to defend or attack they will pass through buildings. This is also done in current situation, we might not notice it but that is the case.
So spotting movers between buildings will be harder than it is now.
On the other hand respecting the falcon paths kills the realistic city layout. Small kill but a kill.
City builder can export as an image from Terrain Editor the paths and import them as reference in cityengine so not to build on them. easy does it…
If he uses zoning he can paint those path a specific color and declare that color as green area… or create roads network on top of them so no building will be created on those paths and will blend more naturally with the rest city layout… easy does it… again. -
City looks great and I hate to go off topic but what sound file are you using I like that wine in the run up.
-
@Nuno Santos since CE (CityEngine) provides uvmaped polygons our solution for better texturing should be the select by material provided by 3dsmax. That way each wall will end up being only once at the texture.
But maybe we should not use facades.
Another thing that troubles me is building wall dimensions like 3-10 windows wide and 3-5 stores heihgt.
Hmmm polyuwrap plugin will be helpful as u can easily pack and align specific maping like one material. But we should attach all objects to one and then select by material on selecting faces… would that work?
Needs some more research.
So in one 8192x8192 texture could have many walls and higher detail.
With same select material we can easier select windows if we make them as separated polygons - material. That way we can have variation with windows like same wall diferent windows and lighted night windows.
Hmmm any free time anyone to share? [emoji38]sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk
-
@Nuno Santos since CE (CityEngine) provides uvmaped polygons our solution for better texturing should be the select by material provided by 3dsmax. That way each wall will end up being only once at the texture.
So this means in the uvmap we would only have to render one type of wall and then every building that shares the same texture portion would point to those texture coordinates? That would allow to most efficiently increase the resolution for the textures, since much less space would be consumed, right?
But maybe we should not use facades.
How come? I’m not following you, sorry…
Another thing that troubles me is building wall dimensions like 3-10 windows wide and 3-5 stores heihgt.
Not following you again
Hmmm polyuwrap plugin will be helpful as u can easily pack and align specific maping like one material. But we should attach all objects to one and then select by material on selecting faces… would that work?
It does make sense…
I’ll try to run some more tests on the next few days and see what news we can come up with.
-
mostly I’m talking about 3d facades.
Like that the window will have a casing or maybe not be at the same level as the wall or having more details in the building like balcony or others that many rules provide.
Sure the plain rule just textures simple wall where the window is painted on the texture is the most efficient… but this is killing the night lighted city thing.hmmm most probably we should create ones that will be efficient for falcon.
About the wall dimensions and height.
When you unwrap u must stretch the mapping to fit the textured area… so to overlap and 10 walls use the same mapped area and not different. But what happens when one wall ir 3 floors high and another is 5 floors… same applies if one wall’s width is 10 meters and the other is 20 meters…
So the texture must be a population of xfloors and xmeters where each xmeters must be seamless. So … we must then group the mapping as per same xfloors and same xmeters of width. Then park them at the exact point on the mapping.hmmm doesn’t sound that easy… Sure we can limit by rules at least the height factor for 3 to 5 floors, well this is the common rule in my country don’t know about POH.
Now on the width if u have the windows on the texture then u might end up with cut in half windows…
With facades city engine calculates if the window fits the wall if not it doesn’t use it…
So that way we use a generic wall and create variations of the windows… this will be easier when it comes to 3dsmax… and texturing. Have 10 walls and 20 windows and you might end up with 10x20 variations… not bad…Hmmm and I keep forgetting roofs… damn. if u make them flat again u have the problem of the texture fitting but low poly. if u make it 3d like a one meter wall on the roof then u can apply a generic texture. For tileroofs its easier… 5 sets of different tiles and we r ok.
Edit: DOOOONNNGGGGG but what I’m saying here… we already have those from the ce library… we just have to take those walls and populate them in the texture dds that we will use.
so populate like 5times in vertical for the floors and let’s say30 meters for the walls… and there u are problem solved I believe. I hope what I wrote makes sense to u. -
One thing I thought of while reading this thread, is maybe making the city objects smaller and butting them together? Would that create a resource intensive situation or would it not make a difference? The only reason I ask, I noticed when you create these 3D cities they seem to be one large piece, would it make it more dynamic if the cities were broken up into say, 8, 16, 32 or more pieces and then placed appropriately together?
-
Eitherway u must brake the city to parts - features.
One city cant be one feature unless its a small one…sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk
-
What you guys are accomplishing has been a dream for so many years. I actually wrote about it in the forums years ago, and I’m glad someone had the same idea!
A couple of points to think about:
1. Killing many buildings with a bomb = collateral damage. If the block is the right size, then it could even be realistic, BUT, why bomb civilian buildings anyway?? If you are simulating a mission as it would happen in RL, then you won’t do that very often… Most targets are air bases, powerstations, bridges etc.
2. ground vehicles hard to spot: yes, they could be hard to spot or completely hidden “inside” a building, but did you ever think that launching a maverick on a tank that’s hiding in a city street is a bit…foolish?
This wouldn’t happen in real life. Urban war is fought by ground troops and maybe helicopters, not fast movers. In that regard, even the current version of BMS isn’t so realistic, by placing so many tanks inside the cities… Of course I understand that BMS needs to caputre cities for the DC engine to work properly, but it doesnt mean an F-16 should be tasked with a CAS mission in downtown Seoul…just my 2 cents
-
About 1 believe its unswered already many times.
About 2 vehicles in current cities are easy targets with whatever… so vehicles are not able to hide inside buildings . Using whatever cover to hide from a superior enemy i believe is followed by everybody.
So yes more realism on that aspect.
sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk