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Architecture - A 3D City
Welcome to CSE CityScape!

CityScape is a VRML experience. The aim was to develop algorithms giving birth to a "credible" city layout without laying any stone explicitly.
With the exception of the City Hall, in the center of the map, all the buildings in the city are each time different, generated by a stochastic algorithm.

The city is defined in 3D, which means visitors can walk along the streets, or fly above the skyscrapers, while following some of the (few) strange inhabitants of this world.

Based on heuristic rules and recursive algorithms, thousands of primitive shapes are combined and placed to obtain a somewhat realistic "futurist" cityscape.
Parks, with trees and ponds, avenues or small streets, huge buildings or small houses are arranged in a regular pattern, looking like modern American cities (or actually historical roman ones).


Fig. 1: Primitives in grid view


Texture mapping is necessary to give live to a 3D image (and lessen the impression of seeing a world of cubes, cylinders and spheres).
To keep small file size, a random pixel-based texture generator is included, giving a more realistic view when walking in the streets of the city.
On a normal PC, the small size of the textures allows a real-time rendering. And hence the impression of really walking in the streets.


Fig. 2: Simple textures to "cloth" the primitives


But for those of you who do not like walking, please visit the city by air.
Thanks to a random landscape generator combined with a fog effect, which gives a breath-taking rendering touch, flying over your city really makes you fasten your seat-belt!


Fig. 3: Landscape and fog effects


Get into your chopper and hover to discover audacious architectural inventions, or to follow the strange inhabitants of the city as they drive through the streets (advice: buy a faster computer).


Fig. 4: Architectural (random) inventions


As a final note, here is a tribute to V. Gardet, who developed years ago a similar concept.
His VRML City inspired me, and more:
The tree shapes, the animation engine and the animated elements, as well as many programming tricks (I never used VRML before... so I needed a model like on how to call, for instance browser.addnodefromtext) have been copied or adapted from his work. So I would encourage visiting his web site, but unfortunately, it dissapeared some time ago...


Fig. 5: A strange inhabitant of this world...


And now ready for the adventure?
You will need a browser plug-in to view VRML-worlds. An option is Instant Reality 2.2 that you can download for free.
According to your computer's speed, the generation may take several minutes.]

Have a walk in the city!

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