Comments on: Google Tech Talk: Urban Reconstruction and Modeling for Building Virtual Worlds

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:14:00 +0000

Hi Pascal,
Amazing work! Is there any particular day to be at Procedural’s booth at fmx?

By: Pascal Mueller

Pascal Mueller — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:04:00 +0000

Thank you for the posts and the inputs. We think that procedural methods such as in the CityEngine can highly influence future/base design and urban planning decisions e.g. we are currently also working on automatic CO2-optimzations of buildings and cities, which could help to save energy on a major level.

Please stay tuned for the launch of the commercial version of the CityEngine in May @ FMX (www.fmx.de) in Stuttgart, Germany. Hope to see you there.

For Procedural Inc.,
Pascal

P.S.: And yes, as coastal pointed out, our solution can be applied to create buildings from photos or to enhance such cities which have been acquired with photogrammetric methods. For example have a close look at the low texture resolutions of these FBS models or the textured cities in Google Earth and you know what I mean ... not really immersive at street level yet ;-)

By: Richard Browning

Richard Browning — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 02:33:00 +0000

But the potential of this technique is that these models can only get more accurate as more information is inputted/more rules are applied. In a long, long time we may even be able to predict, quite accurately, what a city *will* look like in the future, and base design and urban planning decisions on this.

By: coastal

coastal — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:23:00 +0000

I think anonymous misses the point here. The City Engine which they describe is being used to generate cities and apply different constraints to. It's either about creating fantasy cities or real world style cities to which ask questions about such as city evolution.

If you're wanting to run emergency planning questions then of course you'll want a model of your real world city. You wouldn't be interested in unreal cities or long term evolution. These are two completely different subjects.

By: vint falken

vint falken — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:13:00 +0000

No problem. I see you blog about SL importing functions too.. *jumps to read that one*. I’m eager to see the (future) times, when 3D, real life, … architecture will be totally intertwined. I hope it can be done. Will be done.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:06:00 +0000

while this is interesting i think more cities will use a more geographic (non-procedural approach) to acquire an accurate model that can truly be used in planning and emergency applications. See http://www.firstbasesolutions.com/3dbuildings.php as an example.