Hey everyone!
I’m starting this thread to share the different city creation techniques I try while I search for the best one, so if you’re also working on a city by yourself you might want to watch this thread.
The goal is to create a large, high quality, historically accurate, believable city in less than three weeks (the game I’m working on will have at least 10 cities so making them can’t take more time than this!).
Twice already I’ve attempted to do this but failed, the cities either took too long to create or they didn’t look good enough.
You can find the game’s WIP thread here, it’s a trading/exploration game set in the early 1800s and I’m trying to make everything (more or less) historically accurate.
My two failed attempts:
Liverpool(made entirely by hand, by first making streets and placing facade models with roofs along them, and then adding details and landmarks) took 4 months and still was full of boring, empty, repetitive streets.
Rio de Janeiro(made with Cityengine by drawing out the streets and modifying an example project to get the right building style) took only a week and a half to make, but it looked awful and every street was pretty much the same.
This time, instead of redoing an old city, I’m going to be making the city of Istanbul/Constantinople. It’s bigger than any city I’ve tried to make before so I’ve got a lot of reference images:)
I’ve got several ideas to try, the first one would be to make a blueprint that randomizes the buildings and roofs, although they are still hand placed.
For the past few days I’ve been working on a quick test scene to sort of “gauge” the time it will take, but I’ve only made three facades so far and one more is needed before I can start making the actual scene.
Subscribe to the thread if you’re interested, I’ll post more tomorrow!
Quick update, I’ve made a blueprint to procedurally create 3D roof tiles and added a new facade. Realistic roofs is something I’ve wanted to do since development was first started but I never could figure out how to do it until now.
Next thing on the list is street furniture and other details, then I’ll make a small area of the actual city just to see what is needed.
I think you started from the opposite direction. Imo if you want to create a large city, it would be better to start from a street generator, then you could see what modular buildings you need, taking into account rendering performance, 1st dealing with area size and shapes, then you can do the building height variation and modularity, and street stuff as the last step…
I did something like that when making the first city in the game, it works pretty well for small areas but takes too much time to use for larger cities. I’m not going to be doing street stuff and all the little details for the whole city until later, just a small testing area will be all for now.
but if you run that generation design time, you can save the level, thus its speed does not really matter… e.g. this project is quite interesting: [TECH DEMO] Zergification - Work in Progress - Unreal Engine Forums
moreover, there is a modular medieval village builder kit (probably by PolyPixel) on the marketplace that could help you for your buildings.
Procedural generation would be much faster, but you have to take the time to create the script first, and then you’d just have a random city that doesn’t look anything like the real one. The PolyPixel pack looks cool, but it’s really expensive and to use it I’d have to completely change all the pieces. What I’m planning to do is make blueprints out of five different building shapes, then use a construction script to randomly place details on the facades.
The first week is out, I’ve made a good bit of progress but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish it within three weeks or not. Over the weekend I’ve gotten a lot done, here’s a list of changes/additions:
Completely changed the lighting and postprocessing for all levels for more realism
Replaced old trees with new photorealistic ones
Made some blueprints to help generate the docks and waterfront buildings
Made a blueprint to generate bazaars and marketplaces
Made a small area of the city to test
I’ve decided to take a few weeks off this project to work on other parts of the game, but the city is coming along nicely and shouldn’t take too much longer once I get back to it.
