Ideas on how to approach a particle system to make a city?

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

Hello, I’m currently trying to model a city with the particle system with the assets that I currently have (20 short buildings, 20 medium and 10 tall buildings, 50 different looking trees, and 50 suburban houses) on random.

I want to:

  • Create roads (to go along with the buildings without touching them)
  • Place the medium to tall buildings in the center area of the city
  • Suburban and shorter buildings outside the center area
  • Place trees on the streets/ pavements
  • Systematic/ arranged ordered particle system (Not having buildings scattered everywhere)

I’m not an expert at the particle system so some tips, advice or ideas would be much appreciated, thanks all have a nice day! :slight_smile:

2

Or any good plugins for Unity? (my game is based on that) or plugins for Blender that does something like City generation?

3

Hi,

you can use a Particle System if you like. You have to model a bunch of buildings. Put them on a second Layer, so they are out of the way. Put them all into the same Group.
No you can put a Particle System to a plane. If you like you can create Roads and City Blocks by Weight Painting first.
Set the Particle type to hair, and under the Render Tab click on Group and select the Group with the buildings in it.
Check Pick Random.
I attached a quick example.
CityParticles.blend (589 KB)

Then there is the City Generator. I never tried it before but it looks Promising:

And then there is the Open Street Map add on. Looks good too. Never tried this one either thou.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ROxTnD3E0

4

There is a good tutorial from BlenderGuru - Andrew Price


which uses a particle system to generate the buildings.
I think it could be extended to the other city ‘furniture’ you mention

Good luck

Martin

5

Thanks guys, but my only worry of setting up the particle system myself manually would cause lag / affect gameplay performance on my game for the users…

6

You don’t have to use a Particle System in Game. Use the Particle System to Generate the City and convert it to Meshes.
To do so you just have to Click on Convert in the Modifiers Panel (with the Emitter object selected)

7

But wouldn’t converting to meshes lose lots of useful stuff like instances? It sounds like this is going to be a big city, so if it has to be rendered realtime (or does it?), that might slow things down.