Some Change in Direction + Updates

One of the comments that really stuck with me from the alpha review was why bother creating a building generation script so similar to City Engine, when City Engine already exists. I spent the weekend re-evaluating my project, and came up with some changes that I feel would set my project apart from most of the existing building generators.

The majority of building/city scripts focus a lot on generating sufficient randomness, so the city doesn't look repetitive. Because of this, the user usually doesn't have a lot of say on what types of architecture should be generated at a particular location in the city (in CityEngine this is doable, but requires scripting on the user's end).

I felt this would an interesting issue to address, so I decided to alter my project a bit, such that it focuses on generating a city with different building types, located according to user specifications. I started out identifying three basic types of architecture that exist in a typical city: business buildings, residential structures, and recreational areas, and listed some of their properties below.

 

During one of my review sessions, Norm had suggested the use of a heat-map to specify the placement of different architectural styles. Using that as my start-off point, I plan on having my project take in an image from the user, with each component of the RGB value corresponding to a building type. For example, R = business, G = residential, B = recreational. For colors that have multiple values, I can determine the building type by the dominating RGB value, or by a probability function. This will allow my project to be extensible; additional building types can be added anytime as long as an RGB pattern is specified.

Since Python has an excellent image processing library, I decided to continue my project in python from now on. Currently I'm in the middle of porting my code from MEL to python and thinking about setting up an inheritance structure (if any) for the different building files.

Some links that were really helpful in getting me up to speed with python/maya was Chad Vernon's tutorial site and Autodesk's list of python commands in Maya. Check back in a couple days for more updates.