PCity - 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. Features include:

• 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. Müller 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.

• Download it here and unzip it.
• Build the project found at metropolis\metropolis-project\metropolis-project.sln. It will place all generated binaries in the \bin directory.
• Generate a city by using the make batch file in the \bin directory and give it the location of a configuration file as parameter, e.g. "make ..\data\sample\sample.conf".
• View a city by using the renderer in the \bin directory and give it the location of a configuration file as parameter, e.g. "metropolisrenderer ..\data\sample\sample.conf".

My hope is that this project is of use for the OpenSource community. Please help to develop it further. You can use the forums to get in contact.

(C) 2004-2006, Sebastian Paetzold (email: spaetzold at users.sourceforge.net)