In the new show we’ve got in the pipe, one of the first elements on screen is a futuristic city. The job of tackling this flying through an unreal landscape of large modern sky scrapers and a smog filled city grid would only be possible if it could be generated procedurally. That is without modeling and meticulously placing every building and asset in the screen.After doing some research I chose to use the City Engine (http://www.procedural.com/).
The functionality of this software seemed promising. Be warned there is a steep learning curve if you want to start really customizing things. Once you’ve tackled how to implement the design elements, and what is going on behind the scenes, you start to get an better understanding. Our hope is this will be helpful in the future for other projects, and since it’s capable of importing street map data you could generate any real city you wanted. They offer a great set of educational discounts and plenty of out of the box functionality. I will write another assessment once I’ve had more time and experience with it, but for now if you’re interested in a dynamic city generator that is very robust this is definitely worth a look.
image is an example from www.procedural.com