World Building [RELEASED] CScape - advanced building generator

Yes that's exactly what I'm doing, Thanks alot!!

 

re: extra cost.

Understandable, no one should work for free.

Very excited about this tool.

 

so currently is there no option to change the street and curb design?

 

I'm not the author, but for me the streets were just grid so I use Easy Roads 3D. It allows for curved roads, which means you need to manually align the CScape buildings (just fun /s) The streets, and everything about CScape can be modified in the realm of textures. So if that is what you want, then you can affect the designs you want in photoshop and then import them into CScape

 

Dope!! So you've been replacing the CScape road with Easy3d, what about sidewalk? Yeah I can change textures, But I want to be able to model road pieces in Probuilder and vertex them then generate them same way custom buildings are made In CScape, but I'm not sure if that's the actual workflow.

 

You should look into Building Crafter to have interiors.

 

ER3D has the ability to have sidewalks that follow the street. You can affect the sidewalk width, height and texture. ER3D has another feature I like; "Side Objects" You can add any prefab as objects that reside center, left, right and have an offset as well. Great for bus stops, street signs, street lights, etc. It's a great asset, as is CSCAPE, just different tools for different use.

btw: Do not underestimate the frustration of manually moving the buildings, as opposed to the grid roads that CScape provides. I have a 1600x1600 terrain, with 16 400x400 neighborhoods, each of these has a CScape city, working nicely btw. I attempted a script to move buildings, but I just couldn't get it done right.

 

Best suggestion I've gotten on a forum, Thanks a bunch Man!!

 

Yeah might give EasyRoads a try, Can the free version work to test with CScape before I buy it? is sidewalk ability included with it? and I'm not sure what you mean but I think your talking about removing the building via script, so you don't have to manually delete every building, am i right? If so I can see how that could be a pain but I have a really small city 4 20x20 with a Terrain 400x400, should not be to bad.

 

Hey do you know if source is included? does not seem to be updated at the moment.

 

I think it should. Well its free so you should try and see your self.

You generally look for a dll that looks like it contains the plugin.
Building crafter includes source. It worked mostly well for simple buildings and might work for you however it is not maintained anymore.
Another option is Buildr2, which has a free demo version, but I never was able to use it without some annoyance, so I got building crafter instead, as I prefered the workflow. Although buildr should be able to generate slightly more complex buildings.
I recently got 'Construction' which is very nice and pleasant to use. It works nice for houses and simple buildings, but nothing too complex. Its also really cheap so you could try that.

 

Thanks bro... yeah i think ill go with Construction, way cheaper and has enough detail for me, but i cant find the other one you mention buildr2? Thanks for great advice...saving me money

 

I do not know what the limitations of free vs paid of ER3D are, sorry.

As for deleting or moving CScape buildings; each building is a sub object of the CScape City (there are other sub objects; ie: Streets, Rooftop details, Bus stops, etc You can move or delete the entire city, or a single building. Because CScape city is built on a grid, if you use curved roads you will have to move the buildings to the new positions manually.

 

Today I realized I'm actually going to really need the grid streets Cscape has, so all should be just fine for me.

 

Cool. Also the CScape roads are MUCH more performant than the ER3D. In the past few days I have been working on ways to improve the performance of the ER3D. CScape is very much optimized

 

yeah for that reason alone i need Cscape, actually the reason i bought it. Oliver also has a wip water system that i'm really interested in, It's suppose to be really optimized.

 

A water system, hummmm. Good to you. Thank you, I will check it out.

I JUST (like 5 min ago) released a beta/final design of my game. Maybe seeing it in action could give you an idea. The is a short video and you can download it (for Rift) here: http://www.blissgig.com/default.aspx?id=48

 

Olix,

I was able to release a design complete (as such) version of my game today thanks to your asset. I absolutely could not have gotten the look/feel and most importantly the abilities without your asset. It is very much an impressive piece of work.

Thanks.

Also, left a review on the Asset Store.

 

Sounds awesome bro but the link just takes me to a page with a title blissgig at the top, would love to see and support it!!

 

So I had some time to try to use CSCAPE with Easy Roads and in general there is an implicit integration based on the functionality ER already provides. You just need to set the things in ER appropriately and make a simple script to bridge the two. You can get the benefit of ER terra-formation under the buildings, and automatic placement along splines, and all its other features. @olix4242 it would be nice to look more into this.

 

My service provider has those issues if my site isn't accessed too often (I pay $10 a month, so I don't expect much) I just saw this issue (nearly 3pm on Sat EST) and refreshed the page a few times (CTRL + F5) and it's back. This is what I get for going cheap.

Thanks for the heads up

 

Well son-of-a-b.... This is awesome! I attempted to use ER3D's Side Objects, but that didn't work out for me.

Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you! You are just wonderful.

 

Wow...So you can still get he performance of CScape with this?

 

Well you get the performance of cscape by using its geometry and its shaders. And all this does is create cscape buildings along roads, so yes, you get the cscape optimized city, but with any not just a grid

 

If you mean will the BUILDINGS still be perfomant, then yes. The buildings get their great performance because of the shader that they built.

The ER3D roads will not get the performance improvement though.

 

Thanks, well exactly how much is performance difference for a small city

 

I have 16 "neighborhoods" and each neighborhood has one CScape city. Each hood is 400x400. When I had all neighborhoods active at the same time vs just a few near the player I did not see any real difference. Which means that even a scene 3200x3200 FILLED with buildings (2000+) I was getting great performance.

Because I want to insure that I can add the other details to my scene I now check the distance to all buildings every 1.5 seconds, and the buildings outside a given distance are deactivated. I do this to save rendering time AND because I am affecting the lighting of all the visible buildings every 1/4 of a second. You can see this in action in the demo I released a last Friday.

This asset is literally the only way I could achieve my goal for my game. The designer has done a great job at creating great performance out of this app.

 

Well, actually, if you look at how to make CScape template models, you could make a enterable building by leaving open some faces. This, of course, means that you will have to model also an inside of your building.

 

With CSscape buildings, is there a way to ensure that an entry is facing the street? Not that an entry always has to face a street, but one of the challenges of using the buildings in another framework (EasyRoads, Dungeon Architect, etc.) is that we need to know which side is the front of the building.

 

Yes, Cscape buildings are all oriented following front building face rule (and Unity coordinate system) and you know that a building front face is oriented towards local -Z axis of a building object. Also, you know that left bottom corner of a front facade uses local coordinates of 0, 0, 0.

 

Yes this exactly what i thought could be done, wow that really makes the integration with probuilder powerful..the only question i have is how to set materials for the interior?

 

Cool. I am happy to wrong.

 

how to change advertisement ?

 

A most simple way is to edit a texture..

 

ok, replaced the texture will my own and i see its not projecting accurate, tiling issue.

 

Well, you shoud look at original texture, and place new adverts according to tiles. There is one single texture that features all advertising panels.

 

Hey im still wondering when you plan on releasing the tool you created for cscape...and also the water system?

 

Both assets should be released shortly after a new CScape (final) version, somewhere in september.
New Cscape will introduce some changes on how Cscape skins are made. This is done to simplify asset creation, reduce final file sizes, and allow for better future integration with CScape Toolset (still thinking on what will be a real name). This will also allow neat features that will come later - like a possibility to link 3d objects to textures (like balconies). It will come with a new updated skin for cities and introduce HD SRP shaders.

 

Hey! This looks really great... I've been contemplating a kaiju/godzilla style game where you destroy a city, do you know if once the buildings are generated they are compatible with fracturing and destruction toolkit? I think the only requirement is that meshes be airtight.

Also does cscape treat the street level bit of the buildings differently than the rest? adding entrances (not truly enterable, just visual) or storefronts and whatnot?

 

I am attempting to affect the buildings at runtime. For example the "Blinds Open" and "Window Lights" are not accessable in the BuildingModifier class.... or am I missing something.

example:
var buildingModify = building.GetComponent<BuildingModifier>();

buildingModify.useGraffiti = true; //This is fine
buildingModify.windowOpen = 0; //This SEEMS to only affect the blinds on 1 building (I am running a loop through all buildings in my city. Also I found it odd that "windowOpen" was the value for the blinds... or again, am I f'ing up?

Thanks

 

Not sure about Fracturing and Destruction. It mostly depends if F&D supports secondary UV channels and float4 UV channel information. I assume it doesn't as most of mesh editing tools doesn't count this extended information in UV channels.
But, I think that it shouldn't be such a hard thing for a developer of F&D to implement support for this data.
This data is important for CScape, as it stores all procedural values into those UV Channels and Vertex colors.

 

While you could change those values, it is strongly recommended not to do this, especially on many buildings at once. This will break completely any optimization. Changing this values means that CScape has to rebuild whole mesh of a building that is being modified and this has an impact on performance. It also breaks static (and dynamic) batching. Breaking static batching for one single building isn't a problem, but doing it for many buildings will destroy optimizations that CScape brings.
May I ask what you want to accomplish as there might be a better way to do it?

 

It treats floor level differently than upper levels. At this moment it doesn't add any mesh entrances (but they exist in texture) , but this will change in a near future, shortly after a first stable release (end of September).

 

Just to share a next step in texture quality for final CScape version. This also illustrates what can be done with new Cscape Toolset.

 

It would be a way to introduce variety in the landscape so that each time the player came into the game it wasn't the same windows open, same windows lighted, same buildings with graffiti. The ability for the user to see the city as alive is important, at least to me. I should state that I am planning to only do this at the start of the game

Speaking of variety, are we ever going to able to have more than 6 "rooms" in a building? When I drive by the buildings I see so many of the same rooms it looks odd.

 

Rebuilding isn't a solution - as it would require too much time.
CScape has the ability to animate window lights by the time of a day. You can use this feature.
Also, you can hack it in a simple way - material has a feature of a control texture called Noise Texture. This is a small 128x128 texture that uses a colored noise and sets seeds for window lightness, interiors, and blinds.
You can simply swap that texture with another one of the same size. Also, I plan to introduce here another texture array, so that you can randomize those values in a easier manner. So, instead of changing every building, you can only change a noise texture. Because those noise textures are small, it shouldn't even impact build size.
Ass for animating blinds, this value is exposed in material. It's enough to change it.

I will be adding 4 more interiours for a final count of 10. It could be upped even higher, but it would require larger build sizes (duee to more textures), and I'm working on other features that will help to randomize things a little bit more. Especially on floor buildings.

 

Okay sounds good, an is slanted and the t shape streets going to be in the final..im thinking also it would be smart to have an edit road options for cscape that everyone could use to get more variations out there streets, the tools dont have to procedurally generated it could be like easy roads or something, like first you generate the city and then have the edit to roads to more manually place where u wants roads, this is how you could add curved roads and what not.

 

And is there any chance of substance material support for the final version or later releases

 

I don't think that a substance support could give any gain for few reasons:
-Substance materials aren't anymore a part of Unity (from 2018). Support for Substance has to be installed separately - and this would make more complex maintaining asset 8would mean to have two workflows, one that supports substance, another that doesn't).
-For a way as CScape works, I don't see any real usage for Substance. Actually, I don't see how it could be integrated without breaking optimizations.
-CScape already handles it's own procedural materials, so I don't see any point on integrating another procedural tool. I have used substance designer for creating first CScape city Skin, but it turned out as slow solution for personalizing asset. That's why I've making CSape Toolset - that is much more easier to use than substance and will be able to do most of the things that Substance can do - but targeted to CScape needs.
-You still can use Substance textures by exporting them from substance designer.
if you have different idea on how it could be integrated please let me know.

 

Well my whole thing is being able to have artist freedom and just freedom period, not only for me but clients. Substance painter is the industry standard tool. Can i export the textures from SP? i dont really use Sd. I want to be able to bring in custom mask, and other cool stuff.

And my first question is is there going to be eventually a way to edit the streets manually using some type of tool like bezier curve to make curved roads and add more personality to our cities?