ESRI CITY ENGINE + LIGHTWAVE INSTANCER SYSTEM + OCTANE PBR

LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member
4k procedural City instancing Example with
ESRI CITY ENGINE +
LIGHTWAVE INSTANCER SYSTEM +
OCTANE PBR surfacing
with 537 Texture bitmaps (uv mapped)
and ca.15k instanced trees (/growing from a pointmap)


snip LWGuru
 
LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member
Markc said:
SERIOUSLY..........that is bloomin awesome.....(y)
Click to expand...

Hi Mark,

not bad for a first render test with 200 msamples with Octane PBR. if you calculate the final then with 750-1000 msamples the image should be even more stable. the generation method in ESRIS CITY Enginge was quite funny because there is the option to define the outer shape of the city with a black/white map. of course i used the lightwave logo. little insider. the procedural generation of the city is then done according to certain criteria. so i forced the generator to create the streets as spirals going outwards. you can probably see that too.

BTW

The GUI from ESRI is not as good as our 3D programs (more technically designed for engineers) but the import export function via .obj works quite well. The only catch is that the textures from the databases for the buildings often do not fit on the buildings or are completely wrong. For example, this is a ground texture on a building. In this respect, you have to rework, so you have to search for suitable building textures and replace them. But this is easy again because the uvs are created perfectly. all in all, you can generate very complex cities quite quickly. but in any case you have to prepare and process these data in your own 3d program. (surfaces, texturing, other elements such as instanced vegetation, etc.pp). and you need a lot of ram. a lot of ram. so more ram. so really a lot of ram. :) (64 GB is just about enough for this example.)

i hope this additional information helps to classify this test a little bit.

snip LWGuru
 
LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member
p.s. i will now go through the 537 textures bitmaps because some are still wrong. let's see what you can get out of it with a proper surface set up in the Octane surface editor.
 
prometheus

prometheus

REBORN
I like it, funny spiral urban planning.

Would have been nice if you would have zoomed in or moved camera closer to the main buildings in the end instead of just orbiting so long.
you know me..always some complaining or if you choose.. giving nice critics, all how you choose to take it :love:
 
LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member
prometheus said:
I like it, funny spiral urban planning.

Would have been nice if you would have zoomed in or moved camera closer to the main buildings in the end instead of just orbiting so long.
you know me..always some complaining or if you choose.. giving nice critics, all how you choose to take it :love:
Click to expand...

that's next.
i have to set up all surfaces and textures for close-ups first. so such render tests are first used to see if all polygons are in place and the renderer processes the data correctly.

snip LWGuru
 
prometheus

prometheus

REBORN
LightWaveGuru said:
as always, the devil is in the details.



snip LWGuru
Click to expand...

Yes, nice.

I kind of have flashbacks to some vue stuff someone did ages ago, with instancing of houses, I wonder which software can handle most polys most efficiently nowadays.
vue had/has nice instancing methods for the distrubution where you can set percentage for each asset, and you just choose them from a list in a more efficient way than you do to setup lightwave items, and I think it had some additional mapping for instancing that I am not sure lightwave has, sure we can map by images and weights, or polys, points etc..but there was something, which I can´t recall unfortunately.

Questions..
Did you use prebuilt building assets? and in such case from where, or did you model all yourself?
 
LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member
prometheus said:
Yes, nice.

I kind of have flashbacks to some vue stuff someone did ages ago, with instancing of houses, I wonder which software can handle most polys most efficiently nowadays.
vue had/has nice instancing methods for the distrubution where you can set percentage for each asset, and you just choose them from a list in a more efficient way than you do to setup lightwave items, and I think it had some additional mapping for instancing that I am not sure lightwave has, sure we can map by images and weights, or polys, points etc..but there was something, which I can´t recall unfortunately.

Questions..
Did you use prebuilt building assets? and in such case from where, or did you model all yourself?
Click to expand...

ESRI creates the houses fully automatically according to criteria that you can determine yourself. Therefore, this is procedural instancing according to predefined criteria in ESRI. For this purpose, ESRI gives all houses UV maps. You can then decide for yourself which textures you want to put on them. ESRI creates default bitmaps for all houses, but these are mapped to about 30% wrong. so for example are then ground textures on the houses. this must be fixed by hand. you can imagine what a work is with a total of 889 surfaces with the octane surface node editor. this is not for people with weak nerves.

so it depends on the artist how good the maps you map onto the houses look and if they fit the house shape and size.

snip LWGuru
 
prometheus

prometheus

REBORN
Post 10 is looking good as for lighting, I like the lighting on the trees.
How many tree variations do you have (unique tree meshes) 6-10?
Looks quite ok, but a little more varied would have increased realism a bit more, though that would put some more strain on the overall mesh count.
 
LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member
there is a tree on the road. someone get the forester and a saw please!


" more varied would have increased realism a bit more"

i know, but i have to manage the available VRAM.
i want to add city traffic to the scene. if there is vram left at the end i can vary the plants even more.
so i have to think strategically here and not only artistically. we will see.

snip LWGuru
 
prometheus

prometheus

REBORN
LightWaveGuru said:
there is a tree on the road. someone get the forester and a saw please!


" more varied would have increased realism a bit more"

i know, but i have to manage the available VRAM.
i want to add city traffic to the scene. if there is vram left at the end i can vary the plants even more.
so i have to think strategically here and not only artistically. we will see.

snip LWGuru
Click to expand...

Understood, keep pushing it and good luck.
 
LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member
ESRI CITY ENGINE + LIGHTWAVE INSTANCER SYSTEM + OCTANE PBR > LUT FUJI 125

The following changes have been made in the version.

Planting was extended to tree halls on all major roads.
Parking cars have been added.
The helicopter was reworked.
The LUT Fuji 125 was added.


snip LWGuru
 
prometheus

prometheus

REBORN
Love the choppers by the way, did you design those by yourself?
And what cars, vehicles will you add in, using DMI cars or? interesting to see how you solve instancing there with variation, varied textures colors though the same car is one part, but I guess you can only have so many unique car models without overloading the memory?

I think I fancy your instancing most, also the old nature stuff, and those elegant fashion shows.
 
LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member
SPIRAL CITY overflight (+light emissions maps for the houses)


tools used for this purpose : ESRI CITY ENGINE : LIGHTWAVE modeler: Lightwave layouter : OCTANE PBR : Photoshop : FUSION : AE the applied height profile of the city corresponds to the city of zurich in switzerland. the whole city has an area of 20x20 kilometers. the outer boundaries of the city were defined with a black and white map that looks like the lightwave logo. the procedural generation of the streets and houses (in esris city engine) follows the principle of a spiral turning from the inside to the outside. statistics: POLYGONS = 14573229 / Objects = 811410 /surfaces = 931 /Images = 496 / GPU VRAM used = 5,910 GB = calculation time per frame about 1 min

snip LWGuru
 
LightWaveGuru

LightWaveGuru

Active member

BTW for these tests the scene is calculated with the day light kernel and ambient occlusion from octane so that the lights do not illuminate their surroundings. this would increase the calculation times a lot and that is unnecessary for tests. only for the final rendering after all bugs are removed from the scene, the path tracing kernel and GI will be used for the final rendering.

snip LWGuru
 
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