No youāre not demanding or annoying, just expressing your needs, which is very important for a developer!
Yes CityEngine seems like a bloatware to me, and targeted at large companies and other big fish, given the fact that there isnāt even a price displayed.
Great news, today I just released v0.8 of SceneCity!
Whatās new
Here is the list of the new features
rewritten as a pure Blender addon for the best runtime stability and integration into Blender. So the circle is complete
separated into three addons: SceneCity, SceneTerrain, SceneSkies so itās now possible to use the skies, the terrain generator, and the city generator independently
terrain mesh resolution setting restored
free version of SceneSkies available. Full version not available alone, but bundled with SceneCity
terrain generation can be from a user-defined texture
terrain can be exported as RAW and standard grayscale image
more HDR skies added for a total of 10
cities no longer require the center of the terrain to be flat, generator will try to build where thereās space available
improved water shader for the lakes and seas: looks more realistic
removed space character from all included textures and models files, for easier support on Linux
SceneSkies free download!
On the road to offering a free version of SceneCity to everyone, I proudly present you the free version of SceneSkies, one of the three addons that make SceneCity. It lets you have beautiful and realistic skies very easily for the backgrounds and the lighting of your outdoor scenes.
Video
What next?
You probably noticed there is no new feature for the buildings and roads, disappointing for a city generator isnāt it. Well rest assured, now that the terrain and skies are pretty robust, itās time for the next version 0.9 to be exclusively for the buildings and the roads. Cool things are on the menu. Check below
restore building generation (node-based?)
allow use of user-made buildings, roads and materials
material generation and randomization
free version
OSM support
bring back night time
objects population on the terrain: trees, grass, rocks etcā¦
performance: add option to use dupliverts for objects placement
add option to build city as single mesh
allow packing of city in .blend file (eg for rendering on farms)
additional road placement algorithm that will fill the whole terrain
This is not a list of planned features, only the things Iām considering. Youāll be notified as I add new features during the development of the next version, to be released in three months, in October.
Not yet, but in 0.9 very likely!
In the current 0.8 you have 10 commercial buildings to start with, the ones in the videos above. There will be more choice and more types of buildings in the bundled library version after version.
In 0.9 youāll be able to use your own models also, as many or as few as you want, and easily. This feature is already working in the current development branch.
The last version the night scenes were possible was 0.5.
0.6 never saw the light of the day ^^
I added a version history here, bottom of the page. I still have to include the older versions. http://cgchan.com/scenecity/about.html
Night time will be back in 0.9 very likely, as I love cities by night, just lovely lighting and ambiance!
Hi @piiichan, thankās for your work on this addon, it is really an amazing tool.
But the *.exrās you provided with the SceneSkies are generating too much noise. I checked the images and they seem to be overexposed, so even at a strenght of 1, the illumination seems too harsh. Look at this comparison, thereās not much difference between the two, but the one made with one of the scene skies takes longer to remove the noise and requires more memory.
Also, I think you should add a node setup to control the strenght of the sun and the enviroment separately, and a way to control the rotation of the enviroment. Maybe something like this?
*Note that the multiply node controls the strenght of the sun, and the add node controls the enviroment lighting. When I use this setup with your images, I have to set the multiply node to something lower than 0.00001, and even then the image looks too bright.
Hey Julperado, sorry for such a late reply, BA didnāt notify me by email, it does it often
higher memory usage: SceneSkies HDR images are 8k 16bit float, perhaps the other one is of lower quality?
more noise: related to the size of the image, larger images generate more noise. To counter balance it, increase the importance map size in the world settings
overexposure: I donāt see a lighting problem in the picture you provided, actually SceneSkies looks realistic, the other one looks like solid shadingā¦ make sure you have no other lamps/suns in your scenes. The sun in SceneSkies is as powerful as the sun in real life, that means several thousand times stronger than a torch for instance. But you shouldnāt have to set the strength very low. A strength of 3.5 is the standard strength for SceneSkies images.
Rotation: so youād like something similar to Andrew Priceās addon to rotate the sky? Iāll add it then
I wonder if this Blender script also can render SCI-FI Futurtistic Style buildings as well.
Now that would interest me if it does because Iām doing a Sci-Fi Rpg game
and need Sci Fi Scenes for my different planets.
Youāll be able to use your own buildings in the next version coming very soon, so if you can make, or already have sci-fi buildings, youāre good to go.
There will be also a building generator, which you can use to build gigantic buildings, kind of sci-fi, like these for example
It says that version 0.9 is out on your site for 80.00 USD
But I cannot seem to find any info on Scene City 0.9.
What has changed with Scene city?
Lastly - A building editor similar to Ninja City would be awesome and then having them automatically group when finished to a āroot objectā would make it allot easier to use Scene city.
That said - Going into a āpick face modeā with a subdivided plane mesh and just double click where you want the Building to go would make it very easy to make custom hand made cities.