World Building [RELEASED] CityGen3D | Procedural city generation from map data

I found out that new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 will generate the terrain, roads, buildings, trees, etc from OSM data being streamed from data servers. I watched a video and I couldn't believe it. Why just aircraft? Why not motor vehicles, trains, ships, boats, etc? Even a simulator in which you wake up, eat breakfast, take bath/shower, get dressed, leave your house, either drive to work or take public transportation to work, use stuff at work, eat lunch, use stuff at work, either drive home or take public transportation home, eat dinner, use stuff at home, change clothes, and go to bed.

 

Yes looks brilliant, can't wait!
I think X-plane 11 works in a very similar way, but this certainly takes it another step forwards.

In a flight sim you interact with the environment in only one way, unlike your hypothetical game where you enter buildings and drive around and do all the other things. It also only needs to look good from distance.

What MS are doing they are doing very well, but it wouldn't directly translate if you used exactly the same tech to make GTA or PUBG.

If you drive a plane around at ground level in a random location away from the airports, it will be obvious how primitive the environment is compared to an FPS game, or something like that.

But I share your desire and vision for the future and it's one of the main reasons I'm making CityGen3D.
One of the first things I did when I had a functioning version of CityGen3D was to create a little driving game, reposted here for reference:

It's nothing particularly special other than I made it in one afternoon having had CityGen3D generate the environment for me. (Vehicle + Physics are from Edy).

But it shows you can use map data as a source for lots of different types of games, but how you approach that will vary greatly, depending on the game you are making.
Something like a flight sim has different demands and priorities to a driving game, which will have different priorities to a Battle Royale game, for instance.​

 

I just wanted to say "great work"!

I found this tool a few weeks ago, it looks amazing. I'm really looking forward to seeing it mature into completion (it looks like you are almost there) and seeing it become available on the asset store - I have money reserved for you, name your price!

 

Thanks for the encouragement!

I cant believe it's been nearly a year since first public release, but it's certainly come along way.
​

Just in case it gets lost amongst all the other chat in the thread, the latest version of CityGen3D (currently v0.7) is available to download from https://www.citygen3d.com/ for £40.

This gives you access to all future updates to the core CityGen3D asset up to and beyond full release (via the website). So it's perfect for anyone that wants to get on board and help shape the direction of the asset straight away.

But as was always the plan, the price will go up just before the Asset Store submission process starts and we approach v1.0.
I'll have a better idea of when that is going to happen later in the year, but sometime after v0.9 is out this coming winter, all being well.

 

Thanks for all the info, I did find your site and considered buying the beta, but decided to wait until it's ready. I don't mind paying more on the store for the release version (and honestly you deserve more than 40).. this tool is literally a world changer!

There are not very many tools like it available, and those that are cost thousands.. CityGen3D is something I've been waiting years for.

I'll be watching and waiting for the official release, keep up the great work; I can't wait to use it.

 

Gotta say, I love this product. I've been toying with it a lot and it's great. I've found a couple of issues though, is there a specific bug report page? What I've found is:
Roads won't generate with more than two lanes. The script attached to the road in the map view can be set to whatever but the road will only be two if it's set to an even number or none if it's odd.

I also noticed that if roadside entities have a higher than default offset they rotate for some reason. I thought this might be a thing with my models but I tested with the defaults as well and it's still present
If there's an official place for me to put these, let me know.

Edit: I realised that the rotation is only if I have the height type set to default. If I have it to peak or nadir then my prefabs are spawned floating or sunk in the ground and I can't figure out why.

 

Happy to hear you are enjoying using the asset!

Thanks for the bug reports.
It's fine to post bugs in this thread for the time being. It's likely I'll setup a dedicated forum on the website further down the line.

You should find that CityGen3D is able to generate motorways with lots of lanes if that is what is in the OSM data.
(I recently generated part of the M1 in London and that worked fine).

Unfortunately, attempting to modify the data beyond what OSM gives you doesn't work very well at the moment, and it's something I need to address to ensure the tool has the flexibility that I want it to provide.
This is because there are some things that need to be recalculated when the data changes which currently aren't being done when you edit the values in the Inspector.

But changing number of lanes on a MapRoad is a really good example, so please leave that with me and I should be able to come up with a solution for this very soon. (Likely a button on each Map object that allows you to apply changes to put the map in the state in needs to be based on any user defined changes, ready for the generator).

I will try and reproduce the issue with entity placement and I'll update you on this one later on.

 

Appreciate the info. The street is marked from OSM as having three lanes (six total if you include both sides) I tried re-painting the street I was having issue with as a motorway but it still wouldn't generate correctly. As a test, I generated one based on the M1 outside of Nottingham and it still only did two lanes each direction. Maybe I missed something?

 

Hi,

I tried a part of the M1 near Nottingham which is down as four lane motorway and it seemed to work as expected.
(I need to improve how to handles roads very close together so you still get curb in the middle, but it did detect the 4 lanes per road and attempt to mark them.)


Please could you send me screenshot or lat/lon cords and area size and I'll try and generate it here. Perhaps there's something in the workflow that's not clear, or an issue with a particular road.

Ahead of v0.8 release I'm fixing up some of the map object UI to make it much cleaner and allow you to change settings more easily after downloading the data.
Here you can see how clicking a MapRoad now has reduced clutter on the Inspector and clear settings for you to edit which will refresh the 2D map immediately.

This is the first phase towards eventually allowing you to draw your own 2D map objects, not just edit existing ones. So you'll be able to draw your environment in 2D and then play with the generator to create a 3D world from it.

I think I have reproduce the roadside prefab rotation issue. I will investigate further and should get a fix in for next update.

If you are getting vertical alignment issues, please check your prefabs to ensure they are resting at 0 on y-axis. For instance the bottom of a house should be at 0. (I'll make this clearer in the manual).
If you can reproduce vertical alignment issues with the supplied prefabs, which are already locally aligned correctly, please send me screenshots of your Roadside panel settings.

 

I created a new project just to make sure I wasn't messing something up and here are the results using the M1 at the coordinates in your screenshot:

I noticed that you're using 2019.1 and I'm on 2019.2 so I installed 2019.1 to test and received the same results, screenshot for proof:


I used a new project with default everything if that helps.

On the roadside entities front, I looked at your building prefabs and noticed they're at 4,0,-9 rather than 0,0,0 so I moved the meshes in my prefabs to match. For whatever reason that seems to have solved the floating problem, even though the Y value was not touched. To double check, I changed the X and Z values in the default prefabs but still wasn't able to reproduce the floating so I think there's something funky with my models but I don't know what. I'll keep looking at them.

 

If you go to Map View and click the road how many lanes does it say it should be in the MapRoad component? Is it saying 4 or 2?
I will try and reproduce in v0.7

 

Both are saying 4 lanes at 3.5 width. I don't know if the One Way option does anything but I tried toggling it and it made no difference.

 

Thanks for your patience, I've reproduced this in v0.7.
As demonstrated earlier, this seems to be fixed now in v0.8, so I'll try and get this out to everyone as soon as possible.

 

Super cool, thanks for your help.

As an aside, are there any plans for intersections such as lights and crosswalks? I noticed that the individual map roads do have names on them so street signs at intersections could be great as well.

Again, thanks!

 

I hate to be *THAT* guy, but I saw that 0.8 was out so I downloaded it to test it out and I'm still having the issue with all roads being either one or two lanes. I tested with the Nottingham M1 coordinates from the screenshots above and it's doing the same thing. I tried different terrain sizes and single/multiple terrains but still only two lanes. Are there steps that aren't in the documentation I might have missed?

Edit: I tried this with both an existing project and a new one

 

Thanks for reporting this. I have a reliable way of reproducing it now, and it looks like the road is being generated the correct size, but the road markings are incorrect. I will debug it and hope to release a hotfix (v0.81) over next few days.

 

Just wanted to update you on v0.81 progress.
I've been working on some fixes and improvements to the road marking generation.
I need to spend a bit more time on it to get it ready for the update, but hopefully should be available fairly soon.

 

The next update taking longer than originally expected, but the good news this is just because of all the stuff that's going into it.

I've made some significant improvements to the road generation in addition to the planned road marking fixes.
Previously the gaps in between roads that weren't big enough for sidewalk extrusion would just be bumpy mounds of grass.
It didn't look very nice and wasn't very realistic.

The screenshot in my previous post demonstrates this quite well where you have two opposing highways separated by nothing other than a bit of grass.

Well I've finally got a decent solution to this problem.
You can see in the upcoming build how these areas of the road are now identified and its possible for CityGen3D to apply hatched road markings to them and even extrude road barriers along them.

This works really well for reservations between motorways and slip roads leading onto highways as shown here.




I'm going to spend another week or so on getting the interface sorted for this and running some tests, but this should be ready for release in the near future.

I just wanted to show you recent progress so you could see what's been happening.

 

Hello,
I'm having an issue when i apply the heightmaps to the terrains. I have tried mapquest and bing with the same results,

I have also tried different terrain sizes.


Thanks for any help

 

Hi,

What's lat/lon location and area size are you trying?
I'll give it a go here.

I recommended using the NASA SRTM option though. I may drop the Bing & MapQuest solutions from CityGen3D in future anyway, because they are largely redundant now the SRTM system is in place.

Edit: Yeah I don't think either Bing or MapQuest solutions are working as intended anymore, thanks for letting me know. I can't really see a good reason for maintaining those, so it's possible I'll discontinue them shortly. The NASA SRTM solutions works really well though. It requires a manual download, but after that does everything for you automatically just like the others and has the benefit of not needing to access a third-party server once you have the data.
Please let me know how you get on with that instead.

 

Thanks for the reply.

area: 6656m x6656m (169 terrains)
Lat: 51.7909927368164, Lon:0.682525634765625

Will try the SRTM system now.

Thanks

 

Just used SRTM and it worked

Thank you

 

I've tracked down the bug with Bing and MapQuest heightmaps. It was a relatively simple fix, just a knock-on from the ability to change terrain size.

So I'll put the fix in next update and leave them both in the Beta for now. If anyone specifically prefers them over SRTM data (when they are working), please let me know. Otherwise I may drop them before full release in favour of SRTM, so I don't have to maintain them.

 

Here's a motorway scene created using CityGen3D with Vehicle Physics Pro @Edy

The entire scene was created automatically using CityGen3D v0.81, which is currently in testing.
Everything aside from the vehicle and associated UI is included in CityGen3D Beta so anyone could make an identical environment very easily once the latest build comes out.

I loved OutRun in my youth and was a fan of Microsoft's Midtown Madness, so I quite like the idea of making a simple road racing game to demo how CityGen3D can be used to help you prototype and develop games really quickly.

Testing it in the context of attempting to build a game is really useful in identifying workflow issues and areas requiring improvement.
It will also likely serve as a testing ground for CityGen3D tutorial videos in future.

 

I had Midtown Madness games a long time ago.

 

Version 0.81 is now available for owners of the Beta:

• Lots of road improvements including fix for lane generation on big roads.
• Now able extrude meshes along sidewalks and in between roads (eg. guard rails).
• New road marking textures.
• Fix for road markings not being affected by shadows (new shader).
• Better texture previews on Detail panel.
• Terrain data and layers now auto saved as assets for portability.
• API fixes to remove a lot of dependencies on Editor.
• Fixed bug in OSM query that could lead to bloated downloads and slower processing.
• Easier to manage multiple databases for a location now that the tile reference is automatically part of the filename.
• Tree distribution fix.
• Geometry now generated in Editor relative to current location within downloaded data.
• Some shape generation fixes.
• Extrusions now use start/end meshes when gaps are encountered within same shape.
• Origin Manager now supporting rigid bodies.
• Load Available Scenes menu option so you can easily load Landscapes into Editor that are associated with current database.
• Fix for Bing and MapQuest heightmaps.

 

I can confirm that I am now getting the proper lanes for roads. Thanks!

 

A few questions for you @CityGen3D

1. Does this asset work with unity's various script able render pipelines? Mostly worried about the auto terrain texturing not being compatible.
2. How is performance in VR?
3. Will we get a voucher or something when this goes live on the asset store if we bought it from your website?

Also now that it is closer to going on the asset store. I will finally be picking this up

 

I have two issues with CityGen3D V0.81

So first of I installed the newer Version duo lane fix.

The problem I am currently facing are:
1. applying heightmap not possible
2. can't create multiple Landcapes/Terrains

So I am staying at V0.80 and upgrade when its fixed.

 

Hi,

Sorry to hear you've had problems since updating.
Please can you be more specific because I'm not able to reproduce in my test projects. What happens in both cases when you try to do it?

Is this after updating existing project? If so please try v0.81 in new project to see if you still have same issues.

Thanks,

Richard

 

Hi,

I’d certainly be interested to hear if anyone has tried to use it with the new rendering pipelines. I’m not aware of any specific issues or blockers.

All the supplied materials and prefabs are setup to use the legacy pipeline.
However if you wish to use CityGen3D in HDRP or LWRP, as long as your assets are setup appropriately there isn’t anything in CityGen3D that is like to cause any major issues.

This is mainly because CityGen3D is designed to use your own assets, so you just have to ensure your assets are setup appropriately for your target pipeline (as with any project).

Likewise with the terrain texturing, as long as the materials you are using are HDRP compatible I can see why it wouldn’t work because it’s using Unity Terrain API (unless there are known issues with that in the new pipelines).

As of v0.81 there’s only one custom shader used in CityGen3D which is for the road markings.
So there may be a bit of work there to get that compatible, but that's the only thing I can think of really.

I’ll run some tests over Christmas, I’m curious to try HDRP now anyway so I’ve got a good excuse to have a play with it.

​

I got an Oculus dev kit a long time ago when they first came out and recall playing around with VR on an early CityGen3D prototype, but not specifically tried it recently.
I’ll add VR support to my racing game demo made with CityGen3D and see if I run into any specific issues.

​

I did promise some Asset Store keys to some early adopters (and those still stand), if and when we release on Asset Store, but I unfortunately can’t do this anymore.
We only get a limited number of keys so it’s simply not possible to do this for everyone unfortunately.

 

So I have updated my existing Project and also created a new project to make sure that its not a issue on my existing project. I am doing the same things as I did before. For the height map issue I am getting an error in a new Window:
SRTM data not found: "Assets/CityGen3D/Resources/Data/SRTM/N52E013.hgt
Please download from http://dwtkns.com/srtm30m/ and place the unzipped file into your project" I was trying to download it manually but it asks for log in. But with which credentials?

And for the Problem with multiple Terrains: its creating the second 2D map (database using the arrows) where the first 2D map should be. Its also deleting the existing (first) 2D map. So the issue here is that it is not aligning the maps together, therefore deleting the old one.

 

Thanks for the info.
The SRTM heightmap solution does require a manual download.
It’s just a case of getting a free log-in from NASA, which you can obtain via this link:
https://urs.earthdata.nasa.gov/
Then you can use this login to download the tiles you need from the website mentioned and drop them into your project in the same folder as the example hgt file provided.


It's normal for the 2D map in scene view to only show what's currently in memory, so it will remove existing map data as you move around.
However, I think what you are referring to is a knock-on from a change in v0.81 to ensure that 2D map and resulting terrains are generated at Unity origin. This was done to avoid issues when generating terrains far away from the origin of your chosen location. If you imagine a scenario where each terrain is 1024 metres and you want to generate tile 50,50. In v0.80 your 2D map and terrains would be generated in Unity world space 51,200 metres away from origin. Being this far away from origin creates all sorts of issues, which is why a managed floating origin system has been implemented for run-time use.
So this all works fine when saving your terrains as scenes, which get loaded into correct position at run-time using the Landscape Manager, but is a bit confusing when generating several terrains for use within the same scene.
Thanks for letting me know about this. I'll consider what to do about this for next update. It may just be case of having a button to move the terrain into position once you have finished generating everything for it.
In the meantime you can simply move your Landscape into the correct position using the transform, after you have generated everything you want for it.
For instance with Medium terrain size (512m) you would move Landscape 2,1 to x=1024, z=512. This would position it correctly.

 

@CityGen3D - I just purchased this from your website.

Looking forward to getting Citygen3d

 

Thanks very much, I look forward to hearing your feedback

 

Doing some experimental work with Voronoi diagrams in CityGen3D over Christmas, which may give you a clue as to how additional map generation options may materialise away from OpenStreetMap next year...

 

Any rough timeframe for a 1.0 release yet?

 

Hi,

I'm hoping around Easter.

Before then CityGen3D will get some map editing functionality and OSM to Building generation, both of which will be expanded upon further after release.

 

@CityGen3D Check your first post, has an invalid link to buy page.

I'm a little confused after reading some comments here about buying it from the page. We won't receive any updates after the beta? And we won't have download option from asset store?

Check https://github.com/MicroGSD/RoadArchitect maybe gives you some ideas for bridge building.

So far i haven't seen any screenshot from a more "mountain" like zone. Could you share some screenshots from Andorra?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/A...:0x7c93ed778ea7f92!8m2!3d42.506285!4d1.521801



(top view)

I would like to see how it handles rocky curvy sites.

 

Thanks for the heads up on the link, it should be sorted now

Developers only get a limited number of Asset Store keys, so it's not possible to offer Asset Store access to everyone buying the asset directly from www.citygen3d.com. There's also no guarantee it will ever be on the Asset Store, although I hope very much that it will be.

Anyone that buys the Beta is entitled to all future updates of CityGen3D via the website, including those after full release.
This includes the map editing and OSM to Building generation features that are yet to be included, but on the way soon.

I do have plans for an additional Traffic & Pedestrians AI module which will likely be a seperate add-on, because it falls out of scope of the original tool (and is some way off, it's just in the ideas stage).


I thought I'd posted screenshots on the forum of a test I did when I generated Gibraltar on an early build, but I may have only posted those to twitter. Here's a few screenshots, which demonstrate a more rocky environment:
Gibraltar in CityGen3D
Gibraltar in CityGen3D 2
Gibraltar in CityGen3D 3

I'll try and run off an Andorra test at some point this week and will post some screenshots here.

 

Cool! I didn't see those pictures.

I will render them here for easy viewing:




I'm glad to see assets like this come this year, as there is also TerraWorld from @TerraUnity team which seems to have better texturing but no roads yet.

I'm the type of dev that "starts projects but never finishes them" xD So it's really impressive to me when i see someone starting a thread on 2018 and 2 years later he keeps working on it and showing constant progress.

 

I can certainly relate to that, especially when I was younger, when it's easy to get distracted with another idea. In many ways, the scale of this project keeps me interested because there's so many different parts to it so I can work on different aspects at different times and it keeps it fresh

I actually have really old prototype backups from early 2016 called "OSMCityGen". I think I first started playing around with some of the ideas in 2015, so hopefully that reassures people that I have plans to continue with it for the long term

The tech wasn't really ready for the scale of what I was trying to do back then, but it's all fitting into place now.

 

I've decided that if i'm able to build the traffic system i will buy your asset, so far this is my progress.

I hope i finish it this time rather than ending jumping on another project xD

 

I purchased Citygen3D - Here is what I found so far and what can be improved.

1. Unity 2019.2.17f1 does not like CityGen3D. I am guessing it has not been updated yet for this version.
2. Unity 2019.1.14f1 works very well with Citygen3D.
3. The Controls for selecting the terrain you want to extract can be confusing. It would be nice if the keys for that were able to be rebound by the user.

 

Thanks for the info regarding 2019.2, I will look into it.

 

Hi, I wasn't able to reproduce any problem in 2019.2.17f1
Are you sure the project was setup correctly with Layers and Packages?
Please let me know what errors you get if you still have problems with it.

Specifically which commands would you like to be able to assign to keys of your choice?

 

In regards to the layers and packages. Let me give it another shot I know I imported the packages correctly but not sure about the layers.

I would just would like to be able to rebind the keys for selecting data in the OSM data view.

 

You mean the Ctrl+T to bring up the Data window?
It is a bit random.
It was originally Ctrl+D which made more sense, but caused a clash with a Unity default.
I think Unity has a Shortcut Manager UI now, but I don't know if that can rebind third-party functionality or just native Unity commands. I will investigate further.
(All CityGen3D commands are also available via the Tools->CityGen3D menu).

 

Here's a teaser of the OpenStreetMap to 3D building generator that should find it's way into CityGen3D from v0.9.
It will be mainly intended for larger buildings where you want to retain the mapped shape of a building, so works really well for skyscrapers and other larger buildings within your environment.

The UI will be very familiar and just slots into the existing CityGen3D interface. You'll get a new Buildings tab and will be able to assign different building layouts to different building types. So your residential blocks can look different to your fancy office blocks, or whatever.
There'll be options for selectively generating buildings when over a certain size or height, because for smaller buildings it will still often make sense to fill in gaps with the roadside prefab spawning.

Initially at least, these are just intended to be background models (so no interior and limited roofing options), but as previously mentioned I'll be releasing a sample integration with BuildR2 before v1.0 to demonstrate how you can use CityGen3D API with other assets.

 

@CityGen3D got a question, if i'm not wrong, i remember you talking about having already implemented terrain streaming.
What did you use "behind the scenes"?

I've added basic additive scene support for the traffic system, but i'm not sure if that's what you're using.