CityEngine by Procedural

Procedural Inc., an innovative software company located in Zurich, is home to the world’s foremost procedural modelling technology. With the CityEngine, Procedural Inc.’s graphics experts have created a radically different 3D application that allows professional users in entertainment, architecture and urban planning to efficiently model 3D cities.

“We are happy that our Mac friends are now able to benefit from the huge advantages of the CityEngine,” says Pascal Mueller, CEO Procedural Inc. “To celebrate it, we created Apple City consisting of thousands of Cupertino headquarters. So in case Mr. Jobs intends to rebuild Cupertino, he has now the tool to plan it on his new MacBook.”
The CityEngine software provides professional users in entertainment, architecture, urban planning and general 3D content creation with a unique early design and modeling solution for the efficient vizualisation of urban 3D environments.

The capabilities of the CityEngine include:

Procedural Street Network Construction

The CityEngine offers unique street grow tools to quickly design and construct urban layouts. Street patterns such as grid, organic or circular are available and the topography of the terrain is taken into account.

Import of Street Networks or Lots

Real street networks of any city in the world can be imported from OpenStreetMap. This allows for a quick generation of existing urban surroundings. Furthermore street networks or lots designed in other programs can be imported via the DXF file format. Watch movie…

Scripting 3D Buildings

The world’s first shape grammar implementation is the core of the CityEngine. The simple scripting language is specialised for architectural 3D content and offers unlimited modeling possibilities to control or vary mass, elements, proportions, rythms or materials.

Parametric Modeling of 3D Buildings

A convenient interface to control specific building parameters such as the height or age is provided. Parameter modifications invoke the automatic regeneration of the 3D model with all architectural elements correctly aligned.

Parametric Modeling of 3D Streets

Similar to the buildings, street appearances can be controlled via a parametric interface, resulting in immediate visual feedback. For example, the profiles of streets can be quickly edited.

Map-Controlled City Modeling

The parameters of the many buildings and streets can be controlled globally via image maps (for example the building heights or the landuse-mix). This allows for intuitive city modeling and quick changes.

Batch Export of 3D Models

The CityEngine has very advanced functionalities to export generated models to any kind of production pipeline. Supported file formats include Collada, FBX, OBJ, RIB and mental images’ MI.

Procedural’s website: http://www.procedural.com/

Photo Courtesy of Yasmina Alaoui and Marco Guerra

Rarely does digitally enhanced photography entrance the viewer the way Yasmina Alaoui and Marco Guerra’s work does. In their life-sized photographic series “One Thousand and One Dreams”, statuesque bodies appear frozen in time, covered completely in meticulously detailed, contemporary Arabic henna patterns. The effect is transcending, drawing the viewer delicately and gracefully into each form.

Alaoui and Guerra were recently winners in the Christiania Arts Foundation’s “The New Classic Nude” Second Edition. Each artwork begins with a black and white nude photograph by Guerra. Layers of Alaoui’s complex ink drawings are then digitally fused with the protrait, with breathtaking results.

Originally from Chile and Morocco respectively, the couple were inspired by the Thousand and One Nights – a legendary collection of tales from the Middle East – and the magic realism of South American literature.

Guerra was a fashion photographer for magazines including Conde Nast Traveler, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. His personal work revolves around the mysteries of women and love, and sensual exoticism.

“I developed the drawing style of One Thousand and One Dreams in my early teens, even before I studied art.” explains Alaoui. “The patterns were inspired by Islamic caligraphy, henna drawing and primitive naive art. The eye pattern that pops up frequently, for example comes from the ‘evil eye,’ which symbolizes protection from bad thoughts.”

The illusion is that the bodies are actually painted then photographed, which would be almost painstakingly impossible. Instead, Alaoui uses the nude photo’s lines as inspiration to create an original drawing using chinese ink and watercolor.  The style and mood of the photo dictate the color and styles she chooses.

Christiania Arts Foundation website: http://www.christinaked.com/

A Thousand and One Dreams website: http://www.onethousandandonedreams.com/

Virtual Snowshoe developed 1997~2001, Virtual Systems Lab, Gifu University, Gifu Japan

The questions being explored in this research are:

1. Can we use real-time streaming data in dynamic virtual environments?

2. Does it have Utility, or, is streaming data useful in controlling various functions within dynamic virtual environments?

3. Can data integrity be maintained and still be meaningful to the user?

Rapid advances within the GIS/ Visualization Simulation industry have developed complex and rich real-time environments or modeling and simulation of large-scale virtual environments. In parallel, there is deep exploration within the artificial life community to develop virtual life and worlds that exhibit simulated living traits. From the Computer graphics industries, high resolution, highly accurate work is being done to create stunningly beautiful virtual environments with realistic rendering. The Gaming industry has also been developing high computing performance, realistic world building, artificial life behavior, massive multi-user networks and high-action immersive role-play. Unfortunately, little cross-integration has been done between these strands as the technical hardware/software requirements, computational overheads demanded by each, and the wide application focus has promoted separate development paths. Yet recently there have been hybrid development styles emerging that promote this integration. This new type of ‘hybrid integration’ across previously separate disciplines brings new questions, solutions and problems.

Mainly the focus of this new hybrid technology usage is the “Electronic Battlefield”, or synthetic environments that simulate a wartime battlefield situations. SEDRIS (Synthetic Environment Data Representation and Interchange Specification) environments tend to be large scale, low resolution with an expensive overhead in hardware and software. Its complexity and depth has grown quite quickly since 1994 in the areas of GIS, terrain simulation, hydrology, modeling, distributed database and massive multi-user environments. Other solutions do exist to support this style of synthetic environments and Large Scale Visualization Industry, yet the research is primarily focused upon simulation and visualization representation of specific environmental conditions, with little or no emphasis upon a persistent, complex evolvement of an eco-system style virtual environment.

Another major problem of the current generations of virtual environments is that they are still not connected or determined in any way to other sources of “living dynamic energy.” It does not provide the continual change that real life forms get everyday from existing in an open system, i.e. the natural environment, food, outside events, influences, interactions, observance, variance, and happenings that are seemingly “by chance,” yet have some unexplainable connection to the overall construct of life itself. It also does not consider biorhythms, which all-natural life is governed by; i.e. moon, tidal, seasonal, species, and other natural cyclic rhythms.

The Questions this research addresses are whether integrating these technologies together can in fact, yield a highly immersive, realistic virtual environment that is complex and dynamic, exhibiting living behavior conditions and ultimately generating the emergent properties required to create and sustain virtual ‘life’ on a PC-based computer and still retain an acceptable performance ratio. The focus of this research is not to offer another solution to the already saturated vis/sim, artificial life, and computer graphics or gaming industries. Rather, the focus is upon using these existing technologies in a hybrid style of integration to support highly accurate, large-scale, climatic eco-systems that can be used to support realistic behaving environments. This Dissertation will present research performed on this topic, provide the approaches used, and conclude with an analysis of the results.

PUBLICATIONS

May 2002: S.T Refsland, T.Ojika, Enhanced Environments: PC based, real-time large-scale terrains supporting virtual life and complex climatic behaviors, Presence Journal, MIT Press, To be published, 2002.

Apr 2000: S.T. Refsland, T. Ojika, Robert Berry, Jr., The Living Virtual Kinka Kuji Temple: A Dynamic Environment, IEEE Multimedia Magazine, April-June 2000, Vol. 7, No.2, pp 65-67.

Sept 99: S.T. Refsland, T. Ojika, C. Lattaud, G. Proctor, V. DeLeon, R. Berry, Using Real-Time Data Streams to Generate Living Virtual Environments, Proceedings of the 5th Int’l Conference on VSMM’99, Dundee, Scotland, Sept. 99.

Jan 99: Y.Bar-Yam, J.C. Heudin, S. Thrane Refsland, Virtual Great Barrier Reef. Virtual Worlds, Synthetic Universes, Digital Life, and Complexity, Perseus Books, MA, Ch.6, pp. 153-179 Dec 1998.

July 98: Scot Thrane Refsland, Takeo Ojika, Tom DeFanti, Andy Johnson, Jason Leigh, Carl Loeffler, Xiaoyuan Tu. Virtual Great Barrier Reef: A theoretical Approach towards and Evolving, Interactive VR Environment Using a Distributed DOME and CAVE System. Distinguished Paper Award, Virtual Worlds: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, First International Conference, VW’98, Paris, France, pp. 323-336, July 98.

Jan 98: S. Thrane Refsland, Int’l Society on VSMM (Japan); T. Ojika, Gifu University, (Japan); R. Stone, VR Solutions Ltd. (UK), Development of a chaotic environment engine for dynamic virtual world heritage environments. SPIE, The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality, San Jose, CA, pp. 302-312 26-29 Jan 1998.

Sept 96: S. Thrane Refsland, Digital Mind, Electronic Earth, Proceedings of the 2nd Int’l Conference on VSMM’96, Gifu, Japan, pp. 171-176, Sept. 96.

Sept 95: S. Thrane Refsland, Organic Techno Art and Technology Series, Proceedings of the 1st Int’l Conference on VSMM’95, Gifu, Japan, pp. 106-111, Sept. 96.

Virtual Kinka Kuji, built in 1998

Researchers took a game system called “Unreal” modeled the temple and grounds, then created an artificial life ‘firefly’ that would come out at dusk and fly through the forests. Each firefly was connected to an American stock on the NASDAQ market, and depending upon how the stock was performing dictated much of the firefly’s behavior.

The question being explored was simple; “Could an unpredictable complex system be considered emergent enough to create true artificial life? The stock market had rhythms but never exactly repeatable patterns. Every day was something different. Since the Kinka Kuji virtual environment was connected in real-time to the stock market, it was fantastic to watch the fireflies emerge every night, and exhibit unique and individual traits every time. Yes there were behavioral patterns, but the interesting thing that started to emerge was flocking of fireflies. This meant that stocks did follow sector movements and were heavily affected by them.

Full paper published by the IEEE Computer Society, 2000.

Citations:

REFERENCES

	1	Proceedings of the First International Conference on Virtual Worlds, July 1998
	2	R. Livi and B. Ciliberto, Forward to <i>Proc. Workshop on Chaos and Complexity,</i> R. Livi and B. Ciliberto, eds., Institute for Scientific Interchange, World Scientific, Singapore, 1987, pp. vi-vii.
	3	T.S. Ray, <i>An Approach to the Synthesis of Life: Artificial Life II,</i> C.G. Langton et al., eds., Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, Calif. 1991, Vol. 10, p. 371.
	4	E.N. Lorenz, “Deterministic Nonperiod Flow,” <i>J. of Atmospheric Sciences,</i> 1963, Vol. 20, pp. 130-141.

CITED BY 2

	Meehae Song , Thomas Elias , Wolfgang Müller-Wittig , Tony K. Y. Chan, Interacting with the virtually recreated Peranakans, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and South East Asia, February 11-14, 2003, Melbourne, Australia
	Scot Thrane Refsland , Takeo Ojika , Robert Berry, Jr., Enhanced environments: large-scale, real-time ecosystems, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, v.11 n.3, p.221-246, June 2002

Virtual Scylla created by Prof Robert Stone, Eugene Ch’ng

The evening following the visit to the Scylla site, Prof. Stone and Dr. Keith Hiscock (of the MBA) presented on their organisation’s projects at a special Scylla Month evening event at the NMA. Scylla Month has been designed to encourage divers to visit the wreck and help to generate as comprehensive a marine species catalogue as possible. All of these records, together with those collected on this recent successful visit will provide essential data for the University’s ongoing research into marine life simulation and virtual environments.

About Virtual Scylla

Our research plans aim to apply the research to the colonisation of artificial subsea reefs by marine life. In support of this, and in collaboration with the UK’s National Marine Aquarium (NMA), we are currently extending and modifying the SeederEngine research to provide predictive visualisations of what one particular reef might look like tens of years (and longer) into the future. It is our eventual aim to assess the impact of possible global climate changes on the sea and to model other factors, such as the effects of pollution or other short-term environmental variations. The project involves NMA subject matter experts, particularly in respect of the marine flora and fauna that will eventually inhabit the reef, their growth and reproduction patterns, their responses to subsea environmental changes (pollution, temperature, etc.). It will be possible to collect regular validational information from the reef over time (via subsea webcams or regular dives on the reef using remotely operated or manned submersibles).

Currently, an optimised low polygon 3D model of the Scylla has been created and algorithms are being developed from extensions of the SeederEngine to accommodate artificial marine life forms. At present, data is being gathered for an early investigation to visualise the outcome in a real-time virtual environment.

website: http://www.virtualscylla.org