A little tool to simplify creating a background city. It's basic idea is based on the very handy 3ds max plugin 'Greeble' but more aiming towards building a city.
Usage:
1. create a poly plane with not too many divisions (the more there are the longer the process will take; more complex scenes can be build from separate elements) - as a good start create a poly plane with 8x8 divisions and a scale of 50. 2. scale the plane to a desired size and freeze the tranformations 3. select the polygons to run the script on; leave out any polygons that shouldn't be worked on (i.e. streets) 4. run the script and enjoy!
Installation:
Just copy the script to any script directory that is accessed via maya. Run the script by executing "icQTown" (without quotes) in the script editor. You may as well build a shelf button with the supplied icon (which should go to the icons directory in the maya preferences folder).
Limitations:
The script currently only works properly with planar faces, that is the detail geometry that is put to the top of the buildings. If this feature is checked off the script can also be run on curved geometry.
Parameters:
- Dropout %: Defines, how high the chance is that a polygon is not converted into a building, leaving open spaces in the city
- Height Range: The min and max height of the buildings
- Min Scale: The minimum amount the original faces get scaled inwards. The closer this value is to 1 the closer the buildings will be
- Planar Surface: Turn this option off to build a city in a hill like poly surface
- Curved Surface: This enables the script to build upon a sphere or cylindrical surface. This option turns off the wells and details unfortunately. Still have to figure out how to query the normal direction of upside down faces to build the details correctly
- Colorize: Gives the buildings some quasi-random colors. This can help the process of mapping and applying materials. Not totally awsome yet but a start towards an automatic mapping function. Please note: WITH THIS OPTION ENABLED IT IS COMMON THAT UNDOING THE TOOL
WILL NOT WORK CORRECTLY, SO BE SURE TO SAFE PRIOR TO EXECUTING! UNDOING
AND RERUNNING THE SCRIPT CAN EVENTUALLY CAUSE MAYA TO CRASH!
- Stairs: Builds stair-stepped buildings with a given maximum amount of steps
- Stacks: Builds a little ledge for every floor on some buildings
- Wells: Creates a varying number of vertical columns for some buildings
- Well Occurance: Defines how often the wells will be build
- Shrink: Scales the top of some buildings for some inclination
- Roof Cube: Builds a cube on top of some buildings by random with the given size range. The maximum range should not exeed 1
- Top Detail: Creates different kinds of geometry on top of the buildings by random. The detail height is depended on the scene scale and expressed in system units. The detail complexity defines the max amount of detail to be build
- Antenna: Puts an antenna on top of some buildings
Versions:
1.3 - added the feature to not be restricted to a planar surface, in order to allow for features such as hills
- added a curved option, to be able to work with cylindrical and spherical shapes (disables the detail and well features - sorry :-)!) - added a colorize option, which assigns some shaders to the surfaces
NOTE:
WITH THIS OPTION ENABLED IT IS COMMON THAT UNDOING THE TOOL WILL NOT
WORK CORRECTLY, SO BE SURE TO SAFE PRIOR TO EXECUTING! UNDOING AND
RERUNNING THE SCRIPT CAN EVENTUALLY CAUSE MAYA TO CRASH!
Fixes: - fixed, what caused maya to crash on some machines running windows
- the well occurance parameter wasn't correctly implemented
- fixed a bug where some wells have received top rims
