PCity 0.1 review

PCity is a procedural modeling and rendering of Cities. One goal of computer graphics is the modeling of our everyday environment

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Sebastian Paetzold

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PCity is a procedural modeling and rendering of Cities.

One goal of computer graphics is the modeling of our everyday environment. This includes cities and metropolitan areas. However creating such large 3D models is often time consuming or even impossible.

Other solutions are needed. One possibility is the extraction from real world data gathered by satellites or planes. However this is expensive and the user is not able to create completely artifical cities.

This project shows a different approach. The presented system offers a complete procedural city generator. The user has to provide only little input data like a configuration file and few maps (f.e. population density or height map). However the output can be tuned via various parameters.

Here are some key features of "PCity":
street network generation including several street patterns
building generation
texture generation from a texture library
visualization engine
The system is inspired by the paper "Procedural Modeling of Cities" by Y. Parish and P. M?ller presented at SIGGRAPH 2001.

Right now only the legacy project Metropolis is available. It is the result of an university assignment at the Technical University of Munich. As it dates back to 2004, naturally it is not in any terms up to date. The graphics look not really good anymore and old versions of the dependency libraries are used.

However the plan is to use this old project as a base to create a new version with more features and a lot of eye candy. Please also note that the legacy project is only available for Windows XP and that it is not sure that it will compile with anything else than Visual Studio.net 2003.