Creative Hyper 😎
Prototyping vibes for your Sunday, hoping everyone is enjoying their weekend (or what's left of it). Here's a great synth as we take a look at a new tool I've found to help with prototyping city visuals.
Here we go.
The Tool
It's called Open Street Maps (OSM) for Blender, and allows you to import a very simplified view of any city you like from around the world. While the terrain and basic maps are quite accurate, the buildings themselves are imported very roughly and not to scale (at least not precisely, because the file sizes would be way to large I think).
Usefulness
For me, it's difficult to come up with building clusters that are simultaneously random enough to be somewhat realistic while also conforming to a reasonable standard 'look'. And so a tool like this can help by providing a reasonable starting point to thinking about what a city might actually look like. From here, I can then thin things down and begin building scenes.
Scale & Scope
Although I tried to pick a fairly small area of the city (as recommended by the tutorial presenter), I actually ended up with so many buildings that it would be very impractical to try and render so many different buildings, each with their own texture and material maps. So if you're thinking that this could replace the need to build your actual city in a game or similar, I might think again. But as a visual aid, I think it's great.
The other option is to create a set of material and texture maps, and then break up the downloaded cityscape into smaller chunks (each with say 50 or so buildings, and then use those pieces to model different cities or areas for gameplay. Because if you choose a major city for the OSM starting point (also recommended because those will more likely have available data), then you'll end up with literally thousands of buildings!
Stay awesome,
EMH
