Using City Engine

[ravells]

Been struggling a bit but getting there.

Being able to procedurally split your building walls into component facets is very important for texturing. Splitting operations can get very complex (for me) when you have to apply splits within splits. For example you split the building horizontally to make floors, you then split the building vertically to make 'tiles' i.e. places where the windows go. You might then want to split the tiles again so that you have some wall on either side of the window. The ground floor of a building usually looks quite different from the other floors, so it needs its own splitting and texturing rules.

Texturing was also a bit difficult to grasp at first, but now I think I've got it, it's not as tough as I first thought.

So here is are some buildings which all use the same construction and texture rules. If I wanted to make a building higher or lower, I can just adjust the height slider for that building and it will automatically add or subtract floors. I've just used some horrid random textures here, but obviously in a final product you would want the textures to tile properly.

The next step is to learn how to insert pre-made 3d assets, like window frames, doorways, ornaments, dormers and ledges to make the the building look properly 3d. That's going to be a toughie, but I'm probably going to spend this week just making sure that the splitting and texturing commands become second nature by doing lots more of these types of operation. After I learn how to insert 3d assets, the next step is doing mass modelling, that is bringing in instances of buildings, like balconies, turrets etc and getting the software to randomly generate buildings out of these components.