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The Tech Behind Man of Steel's Metropolis

Posted by Soulskill on 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."

7 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Critic? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm not much of a fan of the Total Recall remake myself, but is a thread's description the appropriate place for such opinion?

    1. Re:Critic? by netsentry · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not much of a fan of the Total Recall remake myself, but is a thread's description the appropriate place for such opinion?

      no.

  2. The future by Thanshin · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's one step closer to only needing scriptwriters for making a movie.

    What's funny is trying to imagine whether one step after that there will still be movies or not.

    i.e.: Once AIs are advanced enough to create movies for us, will they want to watch movies?

    My vote goes for : "Yes. And the first big hit will be the movie about how they exterminated us."

    P.S.: The second big hit will be about a lone AI that learned to live in peace with the humans and to adapt to their strange ways. It will be called "Dances with cars".

  3. Re:Python by Thanshin · · Score: 5, Funny

    They did the best they could after discovering that all the pythons had been used on that movie about a motherfucking plane.

  4. Re:and movies will be better? by ciderbrew · · Score: 4, Funny

    At least Cars 2 didn't rattle the fuck out of the CGI camera. I hope they invent the CGI steadicam soon!

  5. This was done before on "King Kong" by drkim · · 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

  6. Yet another Slashvertisement by gigaherz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... except this one also takes the chance to express a subjective opinion on a movie that I personally liked enough.