City Viewer aka Toy Town 2
City Viewer is released!
City Viewer is a separate application which can build and display a 3D model of a city generated in MFCG. In contrast with its spiritual predecessor Toy Town, it doesn't do procedural generation - the cities you see before importing your custom ones, are generated in MFCG as well, they just come bundled with the viewer.
Is it Toy Town 2?
I used to call this project Toy Town 2, but eventually decided to abandon the name in favour of the plain and unimaginative "City Viewer" because the images it produces doesn't look like toy towns. In some aspects this application is simpler or even cruder than the original Toy Town: no gable roofs, no windows, no trees. It's not a complete degradation though, the viewer is much faster and can handle much larger cities. Also I'm planning to improve visuals gradually, but I'm not sure yet what I am aiming for.
What are the plans for it?
As I said I am going to improve the quality of produced models and probably quality of render. I don't know if anybody really needs it (I mean if anybody has some real use for it, not just to have a look and say "right"), so for now I'll try to focus on stuff which interests me. For example, if everything goes well, the next release will include the "elevation" option to place a city on a hilly surface instead of a plane. Also this project will be used to test some UI libraries / approaches / ideas, which eventually may be adopted in MFCG.
Comments
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Hi . I'm restarting playing RPG with my child, and your viewer is very useful for giving them some 3D screenshots of the city, increasing the immersion of the game.
I use it with Azgaar world generator, and it works well!
Some improvment that could be made :
- Azgaard make a connection with your site, but you've got only 3 town size options. Many times the city seems not to be big enough, or too big for the population. Maybe you could add one or two more sizes between small/medium/large ?
- On the 3D viewer, the castles always seems very very high
- I read that you're working on generation on non-flat ground : great idea:-D
You're work on both your city generator and 3D viewer is amazing, hope you'll go on!
Bindusara
Cheers!
Thanks! Knowing that, I have re-tested Azgaar's link to your generator : it take population/1000 as a size parameter. I think it's not enough. For example, for a city of 6387 inhabitants, the result is here : http://fantasycities.watabou.ru/?size=6&seed=1371544820161&name=Bunwiganby&hub=0... .... i think it may be a little overcrowded :-D. I contact Azgaar for explaining him what's seems to be wrong.
That's pretty great. Used the generator now for my first D&D-City and am happy to be able to show my players not only a map but really the city.
Sadly i am not able to stop the rotation, since my keyboard-layout does not support the given key. A clickable menue like in the MFCG might be a good addition.
Thanks!
It's tilde (~), I'm sure there should be tilde somewhere on your keyboard (and I'll change the description, because it's hard to understand what that [`] is). If there is no tilde then you can switch to the second viewing mode [2] - it's a "pedestrian view", but you can move into the air if you need a bird-eye view.
Ah, yeah. I have to use the alt key plus the plus key to get to the tilde, so i did not find it at first. Thanks.
Such a great set of tools!
Great idea to include some terrain. I agree with Quenten about doors and windows at least. Perhaps some options for horizon variations? wall, roof, ground textures?
I was able to export my town via OBJ to my 3D printer, w/quite excellent results!
Thanks for the awesome work Watabau!
Love the gable roofs. Now for doors, windows, flower boxes, doormats, shoe scrapers, welcome signs, street signs, traffic lights, and of course a MacDonalds.
Seriously, the idea of a hill sounds tremendous. Perhaps have contour lines in the MCFG as well?
I have exported the city I successfully dragged onto the viewer, but what do I do with it , ie, how do I use .obj files? Sorry, but I am a technomoron.
Your big fan, Quenten
After importing a map into the viewer you can simply enjoy viewing it in 3D - that was its initial purpose.
Or you can export a city as an .OBJ file and then import it in some real 3D software. For example, you can modify and render it in Blender to get nicer images, or you can use it in Unity as a part of environment in a game.
And that's it, the viewer itself doesn't provide tons of opportunities :)
Could I use this to import the generated cities into UE4?
It depends on what you are going to do with it there. I tried to export the model as OBJ (link). It's trivial, so I'll probably add it as "documented" feature, but I'm not sure it's useful for anybody.
If it's not too hard to add, I for one would certainly like it for map making.
Edit: Especially if you incorporate your mansion generator! Not sure how hard it would be to do though.
I'd find it useful for sure. I don't particularly like white boxing or level design, so if I can just plop down a city as a testing bed for whatever I'm working on that would be really cool.
This is pretty cool! Have you considered CityJSON (https://www.cityjson.org/) over (or in addition to) GeoJSON export? Using a standard specification for city buildings should lead to better interoperability between different tools!
I'll take a look, thanks! But right now it seems to me that I'll have to switch to some custom (JSON-based) format.
Love your stuff! Could you combine this with your mansion generator in some way? That way we'd get gabled roof geometry too?
The mansion generator was created with this use in mind, but in practice it's not easy to implement and performance is just one of the problems.
Makes sense. I, personally, wouldn't worry much about performance. I'd be using it for generating images to paint over in photoshop.
This is great! Is there an option to export to STL so I can 3D print my generated towns?
Thanks! At this moment I'm not planning to add more formats to export, but this may change in the future.
I have exported a medium city as JSON, but how do I get it into City viewer? I have tried Crt C then Crt V, but nothing happens.
Drag and drop the exported JSON file to the viewer.
I tried this, and got this: (shorthened for space, and no pic at all.
{ "type": "FeatureCollection", "features": [ { "type": "Feature", "properties": { "id": "values", "roadWidth": 0.00007207207207207208, "towerRadius": 0.00006846846846846847, "wallThickness": 0.00006846846846846847, "version": "0.7.4", "riverWidth": 0.00030589267170456956 } }, { "type": "Feature", "geometry": { "type": "Polygon", "coordinates": [ [ [ -0.011786272398350993, 0.0007293488994151453 ],Er... are you sure you are dropping the file on the generator itself, not somewhere else on the page containing it? (I don't have an app to capture a video how it should look)
Anyway, I'll try to implement a more obvious way to import maps, this one causes too much confusion.
I have worked out what I was doing wrong. Boy, it is FANTASTIC. Now a 3D view of my generated city, from which I can take multiple snap images, and lead my players along 3D streets. This tool has become just fantastic.
What did you do? I dropped it directly onto the view and nothing is working.