9 ms·

Procedural cityscapes creation: Openstreetmap import in Unity and Houdini Engine

141 points by liotier 6y ago

Hupriene 6y ago
Neat. Once you add zoning aka biomes, it seems like this could be really useful in generating realistic game maps.
- valesco 6y ago
  The upcoming Flight Simulator 2020 uses Bing Map in a similar way.
- 42droids 6y ago
  I read, "Once you add zombies..." and had a great idea. :)
tarr11 6y ago
Is there a software library that has the same "procedural power" as tools like Houdini? Eg, where I could build something like this demo, but purely in Python. I've tried using Houdini which was very powerful, but was put off by the "visual node builder". I'd like to be able to do something similar, but purely using code.
- gimmeThaBeet 6y ago
  still node based, but open source, in blender land there is sverchok: http://nortikin.github.io/sverchok/Gallery http://nortikin.github.io/sverchok/Gallery probably your closest bet imo. they're honest about the strengths and weaknesses, and while it doesn't have all the conveniences of commercial packages, the script node is there and can bring everything in sverchok and blender to bear in python.
- pella 6y ago
  * blender-osm : https://gumroad.com/l/blender-osm https://gumroad.com/l/blender-osm * https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Blender https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Blender * https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Unity https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Unity
- buovjaga 6y ago
  Only found this Python thing (not maintained): https://github.com/josauder/procedural_city_generation https://github.com/josauder/procedural_city_generation
- mholub 6y ago
  well..Houdini is scriptable in python too :)
- aerique 6y ago
  GDScript in the Godot game engine is pretty similar to Python. • https://github.com/RodZill4/godot-procedural-maze https://github.com/RodZill4/godot-procedural-maze • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YShYWaGF3Nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YShYWaGF3Nc
- jpm48 6y ago
  Have a look at Gaffer, it's a great FOSS alternative node based vfx system. https://www.gafferhq.org/ https://www.gafferhq.org/ can be a pain to build but really cool.
- andybak 6y ago
  As other people have mentioned both Blender and Houdini are scriptable to quite a deep level. Blender is also open source. I suspect a combination of Blender, Sverchok and your own code driving them both would be close to what you ask for. I'm interested in real-time, interactive stuff so I'm doing similar things in Unity. Unity allows scripting and customization right down to close to the metal and the UI is extremely amenable to customization as well. Tools such as Archimatix show how far you can push this: https://archimatix.com/ https://archimatix.com/ I'm currently working on procedural geometry and I keep flip-flopping between a simple and fast UI (very creative and intuitive), a node-based UI (slower but powerful) and a purely code-based interface (a weird mixture - powerful, sometimes fast and intuitive and sometimes not). I don't think node-based UI's are inherently bad. It's just hard to make them not suck and I know of very few examples that aren't plodding, inspiration killers. But code is equally hard to make fluent and inspirational. Discoverability is poor and to do creative "live coding" you need to have a good memory, a great API, awesome autocomplete and a degree of luck. So I'm developing 3 different interfaces and trying to understand where the sweet spot might lie. Maybe I'll be able to whittle it down to one interface eventually. ;-) A quick prototype of my "fast" UI is here: http://www.polyhydra.org.uk/media/fastui/ http://www.polyhydra.org.uk/media/fastui/ Entirely keyboard driven at the moment. Crashes a bit too much but you get the idea. I'm currently refactoring the thing to be more useful as a code library as well: https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra-upm https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra-upm
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aap_ 6y ago
Very cool. I immediately recognized this procedural city as Berlin. Guess it's working pretty well.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Likewise. I wonder how much of that recognisability is the general shape and surfaces of the buildings, how much of the height of the buildings, and how much is the street furniture and the trees?
- stinzen 6y ago
  Glad to hear that :D /dev
andybak 6y ago
Related: I bought this on a whim and I'm yet to try it: https://www.citygen3d.com/ https://www.citygen3d.com/ Mapbox have a Unity SDK that has similar functionality: https://www.mapbox.com/unity https://www.mapbox.com/unity And these guys are doing cool things built upon OSM: https://osmbuildings.org/ https://osmbuildings.org/
- jmkb 6y ago
  See also: https://demo.f4map.com/#lat=40.7113593&lon=-74.0034646&zoom=16 https://demo.f4map.com/#lat=40.7113593&lon=-74.0034646&zoom=...
- tezza 6y ago
  WRLD have a similar service and have textured buildings https://www.wrld3d.com/3d-maps/ https://www.wrld3d.com/3d-maps/ They have a Unity plugin
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
coldcode 6y ago
I wonder if you could do this with period buildings or houses/industrial complexes/stores. Maybe that's too complex to manage. But it's still amazing.
- stinzen 6y ago
  There is some information about what building type it is, residential, commercial, it's different how much is tagged in different parts of the world, this is Berlin so quite a lot is tagged, but not all. I'm thinking that using the information where there is information and then doing the rest randomly with some rules is a good way forward. Of course the type of building doesn't say which style it is in but I've been thinking about using area size of OSM building shape for example, a very big area is probably a modern one, a very tall one as well if that information is there. There seams to be some movement around mapping the building style and/or features in the ML space though, using crowd sourced images, point clouds. Would be amazing to be able to feed that into the system and get facade material, color, architectural style. -stina flodström
gspr 6y ago
This is beautiful! How come computer games don't do this kind of thing? Imagine something like Grand Theft Auto set in any city or even small town of your choosing – automatically generated like this.
- partomniscient 6y ago
  They've been doing this for a while in 'narrower' rather than open world applications. Here's an example of a couple of different racing games set in Edinburgh one earlier, one later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqYyvKWLn04&t=2m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqYyvKWLn04&t=2m It does get concerning. Is the matrix construction considered complete when we can't tell the map from the territory, even if we haven't checked its consistency for every vertice?
tombh 6y ago
Does anyone recognise any of the streets well enough to find the same scene on Google Street View? So we can make a comparison?
- stinzen 6y ago
  Hi, dev here, most of the video is from the area Bergmannkiez in Berlin, the one with a lot of trees is for example Friesenstraße. Looking at streetview there should definitely be more parked cars everywhere :) /stina
jjmontesl 6y ago
Hello! I'm also working on something similar: http://www.yourcityracing.com http://www.yourcityracing.com. I plan to make the toolset open source (https://twitter.com/jjmontes/status/1288109714631348226 https://twitter.com/jjmontes/status/1288109714631348226).
dabreegster 6y ago
Beautiful work! Do you have any demos of how more complex intersections are rendered? https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/47.64626/-122.34944 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/47.64626/-122.34944 is a decent stress test. And I'm curious, how do you compute road width? Are you using the highway type, the number of lanes, something else?
- stinzen 6y ago
  Hi, thank you! I don't have more complex crossings like that yet, but I want to look into it. Fore complex road systems most companies are using HD maps, like the ones from HERE, they have more detailed lane information. I looked up the standard german lane width and then take that times the number of lanes. Then it's also possible to tweak the lane width in the tool. It's totally possible to use highway type for different widths, just haven't implemented that yet! Want to add bicycle lanes and parking lanes, bus lanes as well.
  - kfarr 6y ago
    This is great! Slowly hacking away at some related topics on lane markings: https://github.com/kfarr/streetmix3d https://github.com/kfarr/streetmix3d The link didn't come through on your post (" like the ones from HERE") curious if you can try linking to the HD maps again?
terrycody 6y ago
The music is really stunning, could anyone tell me the background music of it?
- stinzen 6y ago
  Pink Flamenco - Doug Maxwell

141 points by liotier 6y ago

Hupriene 6y ago

Neat. Once you add zoning aka biomes, it seems like this could be really useful in generating realistic game maps.

valesco 6y ago
The upcoming Flight Simulator 2020 uses Bing Map in a similar way.
42droids 6y ago
I read, "Once you add zombies..." and had a great idea. :)

tarr11 6y ago

Is there a software library that has the same "procedural power" as tools like Houdini? Eg, where I could build something like this demo, but purely in Python. I've tried using Houdini which was very powerful, but was put off by the "visual node builder". I'd like to be able to do something similar, but purely using code.

gimmeThaBeet 6y ago
still node based, but open source, in blender land there is sverchok: http://nortikin.github.io/sverchok/Gallery http://nortikin.github.io/sverchok/Gallery probably your closest bet imo. they're honest about the strengths and weaknesses, and while it doesn't have all the conveniences of commercial packages, the script node is there and can bring everything in sverchok and blender to bear in python.
pella 6y ago
* blender-osm : https://gumroad.com/l/blender-osm https://gumroad.com/l/blender-osm * https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Blender https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Blender * https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Unity https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Unity
buovjaga 6y ago
Only found this Python thing (not maintained): https://github.com/josauder/procedural_city_generation https://github.com/josauder/procedural_city_generation
mholub 6y ago
well..Houdini is scriptable in python too :)
aerique 6y ago
GDScript in the Godot game engine is pretty similar to Python. • https://github.com/RodZill4/godot-procedural-maze https://github.com/RodZill4/godot-procedural-maze • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YShYWaGF3Nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YShYWaGF3Nc
jpm48 6y ago
Have a look at Gaffer, it's a great FOSS alternative node based vfx system. https://www.gafferhq.org/ https://www.gafferhq.org/ can be a pain to build but really cool.
andybak 6y ago
As other people have mentioned both Blender and Houdini are scriptable to quite a deep level. Blender is also open source. I suspect a combination of Blender, Sverchok and your own code driving them both would be close to what you ask for. I'm interested in real-time, interactive stuff so I'm doing similar things in Unity. Unity allows scripting and customization right down to close to the metal and the UI is extremely amenable to customization as well. Tools such as Archimatix show how far you can push this: https://archimatix.com/ https://archimatix.com/ I'm currently working on procedural geometry and I keep flip-flopping between a simple and fast UI (very creative and intuitive), a node-based UI (slower but powerful) and a purely code-based interface (a weird mixture - powerful, sometimes fast and intuitive and sometimes not). I don't think node-based UI's are inherently bad. It's just hard to make them not suck and I know of very few examples that aren't plodding, inspiration killers. But code is equally hard to make fluent and inspirational. Discoverability is poor and to do creative "live coding" you need to have a good memory, a great API, awesome autocomplete and a degree of luck. So I'm developing 3 different interfaces and trying to understand where the sweet spot might lie. Maybe I'll be able to whittle it down to one interface eventually. ;-) A quick prototype of my "fast" UI is here: http://www.polyhydra.org.uk/media/fastui/ http://www.polyhydra.org.uk/media/fastui/ Entirely keyboard driven at the moment. Crashes a bit too much but you get the idea. I'm currently refactoring the thing to be more useful as a code library as well: https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra-upm https://github.com/IxxyXR/polyhydra-upm
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

aap_ 6y ago

Very cool. I immediately recognized this procedural city as Berlin. Guess it's working pretty well.

ben_w 6y ago
Likewise. I wonder how much of that recognisability is the general shape and surfaces of the buildings, how much of the height of the buildings, and how much is the street furniture and the trees?
stinzen 6y ago
Glad to hear that :D /dev

andybak 6y ago

Related: I bought this on a whim and I'm yet to try it: https://www.citygen3d.com/ https://www.citygen3d.com/ Mapbox have a Unity SDK that has similar functionality: https://www.mapbox.com/unity https://www.mapbox.com/unity And these guys are doing cool things built upon OSM: https://osmbuildings.org/ https://osmbuildings.org/

jmkb 6y ago
See also: https://demo.f4map.com/#lat=40.7113593&lon=-74.0034646&zoom=16 https://demo.f4map.com/#lat=40.7113593&lon=-74.0034646&zoom=...
tezza 6y ago
WRLD have a similar service and have textured buildings https://www.wrld3d.com/3d-maps/ https://www.wrld3d.com/3d-maps/ They have a Unity plugin

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

coldcode 6y ago

I wonder if you could do this with period buildings or houses/industrial complexes/stores. Maybe that's too complex to manage. But it's still amazing.

stinzen 6y ago
There is some information about what building type it is, residential, commercial, it's different how much is tagged in different parts of the world, this is Berlin so quite a lot is tagged, but not all. I'm thinking that using the information where there is information and then doing the rest randomly with some rules is a good way forward. Of course the type of building doesn't say which style it is in but I've been thinking about using area size of OSM building shape for example, a very big area is probably a modern one, a very tall one as well if that information is there. There seams to be some movement around mapping the building style and/or features in the ML space though, using crowd sourced images, point clouds. Would be amazing to be able to feed that into the system and get facade material, color, architectural style. -stina flodström

gspr 6y ago

This is beautiful! How come computer games don't do this kind of thing? Imagine something like Grand Theft Auto set in any city or even small town of your choosing – automatically generated like this.

partomniscient 6y ago
They've been doing this for a while in 'narrower' rather than open world applications. Here's an example of a couple of different racing games set in Edinburgh one earlier, one later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqYyvKWLn04&t=2m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqYyvKWLn04&t=2m It does get concerning. Is the matrix construction considered complete when we can't tell the map from the territory, even if we haven't checked its consistency for every vertice?

tombh 6y ago

Does anyone recognise any of the streets well enough to find the same scene on Google Street View? So we can make a comparison?

stinzen 6y ago
Hi, dev here, most of the video is from the area Bergmannkiez in Berlin, the one with a lot of trees is for example Friesenstraße. Looking at streetview there should definitely be more parked cars everywhere :) /stina

jjmontesl 6y ago

Hello! I'm also working on something similar: http://www.yourcityracing.com http://www.yourcityracing.com. I plan to make the toolset open source (https://twitter.com/jjmontes/status/1288109714631348226 https://twitter.com/jjmontes/status/1288109714631348226).

dabreegster 6y ago

Beautiful work! Do you have any demos of how more complex intersections are rendered? https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/47.64626/-122.34944 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/47.64626/-122.34944 is a decent stress test. And I'm curious, how do you compute road width? Are you using the highway type, the number of lanes, something else?

stinzen 6y ago
Hi, thank you! I don't have more complex crossings like that yet, but I want to look into it. Fore complex road systems most companies are using HD maps, like the ones from HERE, they have more detailed lane information. I looked up the standard german lane width and then take that times the number of lanes. Then it's also possible to tweak the lane width in the tool. It's totally possible to use highway type for different widths, just haven't implemented that yet! Want to add bicycle lanes and parking lanes, bus lanes as well.
- kfarr 6y ago
  This is great! Slowly hacking away at some related topics on lane markings: https://github.com/kfarr/streetmix3d https://github.com/kfarr/streetmix3d The link didn't come through on your post (" like the ones from HERE") curious if you can try linking to the HD maps again?

terrycody 6y ago

The music is really stunning, could anyone tell me the background music of it?

stinzen 6y ago
Pink Flamenco - Doug Maxwell