Wednesday 23 Jul 2008 - 11:31
At this year’s Siggraph, a 3D recreation of the ancient Rome of 320AD will be revealed, where a new graphics technology has been applied to reconstruct the extremely-detailed virtual urban environment. The showing coincides with the commercial launch of the procedural mapping technology behind it.
Procedural has released CityEngine, which the company describes as a radically different 3D application that allows the modelling of cities up to 10 times faster than previous solutions, making automatic digital city creation possible for professional users. It's a compelling tool for the production of video games, feature films and television series, architectural visualizations and applications for 3D Web sites, according to the company.
As the core of the CityEngine, the shape grammar has been designed specifically for rule-based production of architectural content at arbitrary levels of detail. The procedurally generated 3D buildings can be exported in various file formats. In addition, the underlying procedural approach ensures the reusability of cities and is designed to be suited for collaborative work environments.
"The CityEngine is a perfect match for the Rome Reborn project," says Bernard Frischer, director of Rome Reborn. "Our project involves the complete virtual reconstruction of the city at its zenith under Emperor Constantine, when it had about one million residents.
"To build by hand the corresponding 7,000 apartment buildings, family houses, public buildings and temples would have taken us forever; but CityEngine's power and flexibility made the process amazingly quick without sacrificing detail or quality. This allowed us to concentrate on modelling the unique monuments. The CityEngine also helps to quickly change the model as new scholarship or discoveries warrant."
"After the Rome building designs had been specified in the CityEngine, generating and exporting the entire city model took exactly 1 hour and 55 minutes," continues Müller. "Thus, Rome actually was built in one day… or, at least its digital counterpart was."
Priced at $6,950 per license, the CityEngine is now available for purchase from Procedural’s Web site.
Digital Arts Staff
For more information see the Procedural Web site.
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