For this project, I designed a shape grammar that creates urban buildings, and designed a city layout to place the buildings generated by my shape grammar. The overall result is a proceedurally generated city!
- Shape Node: This is the basic building block for my grammar. A shape node knows its shape, its max height, its position/rotation/scale, its iteration number, and its color.
- All transformations while performing the iterations are done directly to each shape node, and then finally rendered into the corresponded loaded geometry mesh by my renderer.
- Grammar rules
| Skyscrapers | Apartments | Parks |
|---|---|---|
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Skyscrapers
- Skyscrapers grow non-deterministically, but with a greater probability than apartments.
- Skyscrapers shrink non-deterministically, to mimic
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Apartments
- Apartments when first placed, subdivide into two components at right angles, to mimic the appearance of actual apartment buildings I have seen. The configuration of the two parts and the axis along which I subdivide is random.
- Apartments also grow non-deterministically, but for equivalent max heights, an apartment's and a skyscraper's height will be controlled by the max height multiplied by a size ratio determined by the city design (i.e. apartment: 1.5, skyscraper: 4), so that they grow to approprate heights.
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Parks
- Parks generate trees.
- Both the number and placement of trees within a park are non-deterministic.
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Renderer: Parses the shape grammar by applying the rules for a given number of iterations. The result is a set of nodes for which the renderer finds the corresponding geometry and texture (loaded at the start), applies the node's transformations, and adds it to the scene.
- City configurability: I have written a city class so that each city has a city size, a block size, and a road size.
- City Blocks
- Blocks are placed according to city size, road size, and block size (set and easily changed by a city instance)
- Block size is flexible: building placement adapts to the block size by scaling each building accordingly, so that there are no buildings unreachable in the middle of a block, and so that the block is filled length-wise like in actual cities.
- Building choice: blocks are filled according to a shape ratio calculated by the block generator. For example, higher density blocks will have a higher ratio of skyscrapers to apartments.
- Park blocks: in the real cities I have seen, parks usually fill up an entire block. Going off that, I decide block-wise whether there will be a park, and then fill the block with park nodes.
- City density
- In my layout design, I have equated city density with building height and building choice.
- Buildings toward the center are more likely to be taller and fatter, and more likely to be skyscrapers
- While high-level density is determined by a buildings location within the city (center or marginal), local density is calculated by a multi-octave noise function.
- Shadows: the user can turn shadows on and off
- Iteration number: the user can see how the buildings are placed and then subsequently grow
- Rerendering: a rerender button has been included for easy regeneration
- More to come!
