CityEngine - 3D modeling software for urban environments

[jezelf]

. Of course, nothing stops you from setting an overhead camera and taking a screenshot. On the other hand, there is a procedural city modeler for Blender that is free. I haven't tried it yet, but obviously the features of a free Blender plug-in aren't going to measure up to a pro film-quality tool.

Yeah - that's what I imaged to do. There's been multiple discussions on trying to create a convincing city/ street network layout - or rather the buildings from above - done in Photoshop/GIMP in the past here.

The learning section for this program shows how quickly you could do all this... http://www.procedural.com/support/learning-videos.html

check out "1. cityEngine basics" - they have white background and grey buildings, enough of a contrast to make a selection set and cut paste onto your map. he creates the streets in seconds,

Then you could probably bring it up to the basic level of detail only, make sure your light source is in the right place, do another screen grab and selection and use it as another layer.

With the function to import your own larger layouts you could customize for your map. (there is a video on the site for this somewhere, but can't find it right now)

other interesting videos in the
Heightmap creation, Street editing, 2. streets

The FREE stuff

Here's some links to the blender script Midgardsormr mentions - all depends on how much control you want I guess - free stuff is always worth a look at! It's pretty impressive for a free script - everything looks very 'skyscrapery' but I would assume you can control the maximum height and get decent results for your medieval towns and cities



http://arnaud.ile.nc/sce/

for the purposes of the end results on a map it's a great tool to try and probably more than enough.