Dear all,

I'm really proud to announce our first release of our procedural city modeling engine, called urbanEngine.

As you can imagine, this first version is still very rough, as it can only work with maps of cities stored as images, but we are actively working to expand it with new features. Expect new releases in the near future! -)

Just a minor comment on one ouf our computers it runs perfectly (AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile, 2.62 Gb de RAM, Houdini 9.5.379), only requiring 90MB for the initial city and 560MB for the fully modeled city, but on other of our computers (Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.5 GB RAM, Hou 10.0.295) it starts eating memory and hangs at 600MB… We are still trying to figure out what's happening -)

Sources are available at

http//ima.udg.edu/~dagush/Projects/urbanEngine/

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. If you have any comments, please, feel free to send us an e-mail.

cheers

dagush & Pinkmei.-
PD Our previous project, XMLShape has been renamed to buildingEngine, and we are making it plugable into urbanEngine. Right now it remains as a separate project.

Nice!!. Thanks for sharing
Looking forward to the new features. works well under linux.

Erik

Congratulations!

Hi,

Thank you very much for the compliments! -)

morpheus101 thanks for testing it on Linux! We are currently using Win and we did not know if everything was going to work on other platforms, so it is reasuring to see it works!

For the next release we are developing an image-based method to create streets, so we can plug it into our “trace” node. Preliminary results look promising, but further tests are needed, as well as fininshing some rough edges…

cheers

dagush.-

Hi again,

Perhaps you can figure a way of releasing this on the Exchange under the “Shelves” entry? This way it'll appear as a shelf tool (under the “Download Shelf” menu item) and people won't have to figure out the installation and execution bit.

This way I'm sure you'll see this fun looking tool get more usage out there.

Jason

Dear All,

Thanks for the comments!

jason_iversen Yes, That's a great idea, and I plan to do this when I have some sort of user interface available. Right now, usage is ugly you can only change the city by defining new XML files, which are not very user-friendly… Generating a shelf tool is a great idea, but we need a GUI that at least allows you to choose your XML file! -)
Anyway, it is in our plans, but right now we're focusing on adding flexibility and power to our humbre urban modeler…

cheers and thanks again for the comments

dagush.-