Finally found a nice city terrain creator

[Destructavator]

I finally got a Blender-script based large city terrain creator plug-in working.  There was only one other plug-in I could find for Blender and that other one didn't want to work for me, but this one, called "suicidator" or something (forget the exact spelling) seems to be good at making buildings that would be good for animations of air combat over a populated terrain.

Still working on the template, as you can see I'm still fiddling with the scale, and I also have to fix the wrapping edges of the mountains so they don't clip at the edges like they do in the screenshot but instead make a continual terrain.

I also have to add a ground underneath the buildings, it should be easy with a plane mesh, very simple.

The building textures are cheap, but at least the plug-in is free.  It actually had a high-detail setting for advanced building creation that I didn't use because it made a massive friggin' number of polys that made Blender choke.

Here it is so far...

[Mattn]

good to know that blender has plugins for this.
can't you assign higher res textures when the camera is getting closer? because an ufo flying high over the street of a town is kind of boring. the ufo might fly between skyscrapers and shot at cars, buildings and persons.

[Destructavator]

Yes, at least sort of - Blender sees all the buildings as one collective object/mesh, which means that a UV texture would have to be *gigantic* to cover all the sides of all the structures of the buildings, however Blender also uses a material system for rendering that can procedurally repeat a (simple) texture across all the surfaces of all those buildings.

This next screenshot shows a tweaked creation of the advanced, high-detail settings of the wizard, with two material textures, one for the surfaces with vertical sides (roofs, ledges, etc.) and a second for the horizontal-facing surfaces (walls).

I think this second example would be better for more close-up video clip renderings - does it look any better?

Edit: added another shot, closer-up.

[Mattn]

yes - that one looks a lot better - now just add textures and ufos

[Winter]

I meant to say this before, but those 'mountains' look incredibly awful. Real mountains don't look like oscillator spikes jutting out of the ground every few metres.

I like the city though, it would be really useful for animations.

Regards,
Winter

[Destructavator]

OK, I guess that (for now) I'll take out the mountains (perhaps re-do them in the future) and concentrate more on the city buildings.  I'm still playing around with the Blender script which has advanced features I haven't fully figured out yet.

BTW the author of the script is licensing his work - the city generator - under the public domain (according to his website).