Hi all, and a happy new year!

Progress in my ongoing autogenerated buildings project is glacial, but as always
the holiday season gives me some time to implement ideas that usually only get
to the mulling stage. Here's a nice recent render.

It's a vaguely-beaux-arts styled building, copied 5 times over to make a narrow
city street. The building is constructed as separate floors, each floor made up
of a series of 'block' meshes, each block containing an arch or a window. The
blocks are carefully designed to tesselate nicely, especially in the ground
floor cloisters. Because each block is essentially a single mesh (or 2 meshes,
if window panes are required), the scene renders extremely quickly (~30 mins
using UberPOV on a 12yo MacBook, or just a few seconds if I turn off the
radiosity).

Some things I'd like to do:
- L-shaped corners in buildings
- stack sub-buildings
- randomly vary the main parameters to give different buildings
- simple street furniture

Bill

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Op 07/01/2025 om 12:09 schreef Bill Pragnell:
> Hi all, and a happy new year!
> 
+1

> Progress in my ongoing autogenerated buildings project is glacial, but as always
> the holiday season gives me some time to implement ideas that usually only get
> to the mulling stage. Here's a nice recent render.
> 
Sounds familiar... ;-)

> It's a vaguely-beaux-arts styled building, copied 5 times over to make a narrow
> city street. The building is constructed as separate floors, each floor made up
> of a series of 'block' meshes, each block containing an arch or a window. The
> blocks are carefully designed to tesselate nicely, especially in the ground
> floor cloisters. Because each block is essentially a single mesh (or 2 meshes,
> if window panes are required), the scene renders extremely quickly (~30 mins
> using UberPOV on a 12yo MacBook, or just a few seconds if I turn off the
> radiosity).
> 
This is looking extremely good, Bill! One of those things I have on my 
ToDo list since... I do not know when.

> Some things I'd like to do:
> - L-shaped corners in buildings
> - stack sub-buildings
> - randomly vary the main parameters to give different buildings
> - simple street furniture
> 
Of course! I am going to follow this progress with great attention. Hope 
you will find the time to implement.

-- 
Thomas

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"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Hi all, and a happy new year!

Hi Bill - long time no see!
Sometimes I'm amazed that we've somehow made it through 2024 and out the other
side . . .

> - L-shaped corners in buildings
> - stack sub-buildings
> - randomly vary the main parameters to give different buildings
> - simple street furniture

Maybe if you arrange things in a certain way, you could take advantage of clever
randomization algorithms so that you don't have to manually assemble the overall
scene(s):

https://news.povray.org/povray.advanced-users/thread/%3Cweb.654420575bb87ec31f9dae3025979125%40news.povray.org%3E/

Heck, you might even be able to use such an underlying scheme for assembling all
the pieces of each "tile".  There's an old thread or two about recursive Wang
tiles - maybe you'll find some inspiration there.

- BW

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On 07/01/2025 12:09, Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Hi all, and a happy new year!
> 
> Progress in my ongoing autogenerated buildings project is glacial, but as always
> the holiday season gives me some time to implement ideas that usually only get
> to the mulling stage. Here's a nice recent render.
> 



In any case, I think the lighting is excellent.

Afterwards, it's true that it lacks a little randomness.


Good job.
I can't wait to see how this project progresses.


-- 
kurtz le pirate
compagnie de la banquise

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"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Hi all, and a happy new year!
>
> each floor made up
> of a series of 'block' meshes, each block containing an arch or a window...
> each block is essentially a single mesh (or 2 meshes,
> if window panes are required)

I am following this work with great interest! (My own city buildings from years
past were made in a different way.)

So, how did you create your meshes? They do not quite look like height_fields
that have been flipped to be vertical instead of horizontal; the quality and
detail of the meshes looks better than that technique, to my eyes.

Post a reply to this message

"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Hi all, and a happy new year!
>
> Progress in my ongoing autogenerated buildings project is glacial, but as always
> the holiday season gives me some time to implement ideas that usually only get
> to the mulling stage. Here's a nice recent render.
>
> It's a vaguely-beaux-arts styled building, copied 5 times over to make a narrow
> city street. The building is constructed as separate floors, each floor made up
> of a series of 'block' meshes, each block containing an arch or a window. The
> blocks are carefully designed to tesselate nicely, especially in the ground
> floor cloisters. Because each block is essentially a single mesh (or 2 meshes,
> if window panes are required), the scene renders extremely quickly (~30 mins
> using UberPOV on a 12yo MacBook, or just a few seconds if I turn off the
> radiosity).
>
> Some things I'd like to do:
> - L-shaped corners in buildings
> - stack sub-buildings
> - randomly vary the main parameters to give different buildings
> - simple street furniture
>
> Bill

Awesome lighting, and picture angle.
The only modeling feature that seems strange is the roof lines of a too straight
and simple architecture as compared to the rest.
Otherwise, the restricted amount of variety would seem credible if surrounding
is like the inside of some fortifications, close to some palace... Also, the
furthest building displays an inner light reflection that does seem to invite
the eye to search there for some tiny indoor detail :-)

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> Hi Bill - long time no see!
I have become something of a lurker of late. I do check the groups at least
weekly, so I am generally aware of what's been posted :)

> Heck, you might even be able to use such an underlying scheme for assembling all
> the pieces of each "tile".  There's an old thread or two about recursive Wang
> tiles - maybe you'll find some inspiration there.
Yes, it may well be worth my time reading up on this sort of thing. I've tried
to place buildings on street plans in the past, and it's a surprisingly
difficult problem. Using a more purely mathematical approach could well be a
better solution.

Bill

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kurtz le pirate <kur### [at] freefr> wrote:
> In any case, I think the lighting is excellent.
This is why I mainly use UberPOV these days - true, it's stuck on v3.7 probably
forever, but the stochastic radiosity mode is just too good. No real need to
juggle parameters, and no artifacts beyond a little graininess at lower count
values.

> Afterwards, it's true that it lacks a little randomness.
I definitely have imminent plans in this direction!

Bill

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"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> So, how did you create your meshes? They do not quite look like height_fields
> that have been flipped to be vertical instead of horizontal; the quality and
> detail of the meshes looks better than that technique, to my eyes.

It's a complex stack of macros with probably far too many arguments. The lowest
level produces bevelled boxes, simple boxes and arches, simply making mesh
triangles with no parent object. Higher level macros assemble wall sections,
columns and arches from these boxes that can be grouped into meshes and unions.
The top level uses a small list of block objects to make a building floor.

I'm passing transforms down through each level, combining them and applying them
to the triangle points at creation. The individual brick meshes are not reused,
instead all the bricks and walls are built separately and put into one large
mesh. This is not optimal from a triangle count standpoint, but a bevelled box
doesn't contain many triangles so I thought it was a good tradeoff for less
convoluted code structure.

Most of my time is spent keeping it clearly laid out and well-documented,
because often weeks or months might elapse between bouts of effort, and I have
to be able to pick it back up quickly!

Bill

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"Mr" <m******r******at_hotmail_dot_fr> wrote:
> Awesome lighting, and picture angle.
Yep, I have UberPOV to thank for the lighting, I only need to balance the
gray_threshold and brightness, arrange for pleasing shadowed areas, then give it
enough of a count value to minimise the grain.

> The only modeling feature that seems strange is the roof lines of a too straight
> and simple architecture as compared to the rest.
Yeah the floor divisions and roof edges were the last thing I did, and I kept
the geometry simple so I could get something decent rendered :)

> Also, the
> furthest building displays an inner light reflection that does seem to invite
> the eye to search there for some tiny indoor detail :-)
Haha I should probably block off the interiors in some way to prevent the
emptiness being too obvious! There are internal floors, but no walls.

Bill

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