http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tommer/citygen/

city generator. i kid you not. check it out!

interesting, now if I only knew something about XML (I thought it was clothes sizes or somethin'..;)

Drac> Very good find and it works so easy...For those who don't know..It saves as .wrl files which are very easy to convert..

Impossible to import it to Bryce 5.01; otherwise it looks pretty good inside CityGen; now they have to implement an export function featuring hundreds of common formats... :-)  (dxf, obj, 3ds and so on)        

Hm, it worked fine with Vue...

attileus> It imports fine into Bryce but you must convert it from .wrl 2.0 to 3ds or some other type of file..Bryce only imports .wrl 1.0...

Sounds nice from what you guys are saying here, but I didn't understand what the guy was saying on the download site.

Is there an instruction file somewhere?

Quote - For those who don't know..It saves as .wrl files which are very easy to convert..

How?

Fran> What do you use to convert files?

Yo ellocolobo, You might want to look at: 3D Object Converter v3.80 3D Object Converter is a powerful 3d model translation and interactive viewing shareware tool that allows arbitrary 3d model data to be imported from external sources, exported to various industry standard 3d file formats with great accuracy and quality. The program supports 440 file formats. It is available for Windows95/98/Me/NT/2K/XP.

Zzuluone>  Thanks for the answer but I already have it..My question was ment to help Fran convert .wrl file..I wondered what she uses now to convert her files..Thanks again

Couldn't get any of the CityGen's .wrl's to open with 3D Object Converter v3.80.  ;o(

i don't have bryce installed after the last format so i can't exactly help out. but there has to be a way

m

Tried Blender and Carrara. No go on importing the wrl's.

AccuTrans will open it right up...

were do we find AccuTrans thanks

never mind i found it

You can also use Deep Exploration and Explorer 3d....

Quote - Fran> What do you use to convert files?

I don't.  I don't think I've ever had to convert anything.  Which of course, is precisely why I was asking.

But no matter, Tommer tells me that Blender can convert his files - this is handy since I'm currently trying to learn Blender.

We are going to make a bump map to use in Bryce.
First, create a square canvas, say 800x800 pixels, and color it black.

Second, create a whole lot of squares, rectangles, ovals, circles etc using DIFFERING shades of grey of differing sizes. Imagine you are looking straight down on the city grid from the air. See the attached example. If you seek street grids, make sure you leave black spaces for these in your layout. Save the image as a TIFF or good quality JPG.

Third, open Bryce, create a terrain, click E to edit the terrain. Then click the Pictures tab in the Editing Tools window. Load the image you just made and click Apply.

You now have a terrain which consists of a whole cityscape full of building like structures of varying sizes and heights. You can play with some of the Elevation settings to vary the height and appearance, some smoothing is recommended to create more rounded edges etc.

Click the tick to save the terrain back into the main Bryce window. Position into your scene, apply some kind of convincing city texture to the terrain, add atmosphere, sky, and even some ground lighting, and there you have it.

Adjusting the height of the terrain in edit mode changes from Manhattan style to country town.

Obviously not a replacement for more sophisticated modeling and texturing of individual buildings, but it can look surprisingly good as a distant city, or a city from the air viewed at an oblique angle.

Best of all, the terrain is reasonable fast to render, although applying a complex texture to the terrain with reflectivity and or metallic properties will substantially increase the render time. I will post an example city scape created in this way onto my gallery page here for you to see.

I hope this helps out newbies, or even experienced Bryce users who have never considered this instant Metropolis method before. Please feel free to save the enclosed city bump map to get you going if you would like to.

See example images here:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1280792