The Tech Behind Man of Steel's Metropolis

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @09:09PM from the your-childhood-has-been-replaced-with-a-very-small-shell-script dept.

angry tapir writes "Much of the urban vistas of Man of Steel, Cars 2 and the horrible remake of Total Recall were not modelled by hand. Instead they relied on a product called CityEngine, which is more typically associated with local government bodies' urban planning and urban design. The software procedurally generates cities using scripts written in a Python-like language. The next version of CityEngine, coming out next month, will incorporate an SDK so third-party developers can use parameter-defined procedural generation of urban environments in their own applications. CityEngine's product manager talks about the upcoming version, how it's being used at the moment, and plans to incorporate augmented reality in it."

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This was done before on "King Kong" by drkim · 2013-09-10 22:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

Procedural city building like this was done back on the Peter Jackson "King Kong" back in 2005 by Joe Letteri.
They called their system "CityBot - Urban Development System"
Using this system they were able to create "...over 90,000 3D digital buildings..." out of "...22 million components..."
Article by Chris White @ Weta Digital:
http://staffwww.itn.liu.se/~andyn/courses/tncg08/sketches06/sketches/0147-white.pdf