3D Cities for Falcon…
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@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.
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Thank you Arty!
I really appreciate your vote of confidence and your will to take this road as further as possible, mate!
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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.
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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.
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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 :()
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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.
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@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
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@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.
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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?
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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
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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
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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.
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