Procedural City Generation (opens in new tab)

I was discussing procedural city generation with a graphics person awhile back. One of the things we realized is that procedurally generated cities almost always feel "wrong" because real life cities generally have a mishmash of dozens of general architectural "styles" based on various quirks of history.

One example: in Cincinnati Ohio, working class houses in certain neighborhoods have stained glass windows. It's usually only one or two small ones, but they're there in certain neighborhoods because of a stained glass artisan "scene" that arrived on a wave of German immigrants. Another quirk about Cincinnati: there are lots of houses that are quite narrow for their plan area, because taxes were based on the width of the building on the street. There are quirks like these that cause a city to be a geographically differentiated patchwork of different styles.

Reading the title I immediately thought these set of articles on procedural city generation. It's about the visual appearance of a city but very interesting nonetheless.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

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Looks like some parts are missing though.

Relatedly, I found this survey of different methods for procedural city generation (template-based, agent-simulation-based, etc.) to be informative: http://www.citygen.net/files/images/Procedural_City_Generati...

If you like procedural generation check out [0]. His recent blog posts have been about his Minecraft-like voxel engine (currently being used for Everquest Landmark I believe) but he has a lot of great gems in his archives.

Two recent articles about his language to randomly generate architecture, and two older ones about city generation:

http://procworld.blogspot.com/2014/11/cantor-city.html

http://procworld.blogspot.com/2014/11/life-without-debugger....

http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/screenshots-of-buildin... - Builds a city over rocky terrain.

http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/city-lots.html

The video in the second one is really cool from a programming and debugging perspective.

[0] http://procworld.blogspot.com

ed: Added more city-generation links.

Or, if you'd like to buy this off-the-shelf, the second author of the cited paper went on to co-found a company called Procedural, which was bought by Esri (the geo-spatial tech giant). Their work is still available as the City Engine product: http://www.esri.com/software/cityengine

There are lots of programs which generate a semi-plausible city map, perhaps filled with generic buildings. But so far nobody seem to be able to generate something that looks even vaguely convincing from street level.

It would be fun, and even useful, to have a procedural storefront generator. One that constructs storefront styles, signage styles, door styles, and window displays. Use images from a street view program to train a machine learning algorithm as to what various parts of cities look like. Don't just use existing storefront images; build them up in 3D from door, window, sign, and display components.

Book on this topic from architecture side: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Architecture-Kostas-Terzid...