Monday, February 08 2010 @ 02:12 PM EST

Hi everybody: I'm wondering where I can get the theory/documentation/ideas in other to organize a team of designers to virtualize a real life town. Example: How the people of GRAW 2 created Mexico City for the game. I'm not looking for profound technical how-to's/theory. I'm looking to general ideas to achieve this project. I had thought something like this: 1.- Get tons of pictures of the buildings. 2.- Get geolocation for each building. 3.- Create the 3D models for each building and texturize'em 4.- Put each finished 3D model in its correct geolocationinthe virtual world. 5.- Done!! Am I correct, or am I missing important/vital steps in order to get the virtualization of a town? Please consider I will be starting with a very small airport (the tower, airstrips and some hangars), and after that I will be moving to a larger town. Thanks in advance.

Co-founder of AulaTI.net , Donde lo dificil de la tecnologia se hace facil.

Tuesday, February 09 2010 @ 01:29 AM EST

I guess you are basically correct, but there are tools outthere that will help you. You need vector data to tell you the positions and hopefully outlines of the buildings that make up the town. This will ofthen be found in shape files. If you are lucky the file will tell you both the area covered by the buildings and the height of the buildings. Theese files can then be used by tools like osgGIS or osgEarth and possibly also VirtualPlanetBuilder to automatically generate your town. This could be fine for your purpose, but if you need specific textures for all the well known building and potentially need to add specific models for things that are not quite box shaped, then you have some more work to do. Good luck

Ralf Stokholm - Arenalogic

Tuesday, February 09 2010 @ 12:13 PM EST

THX Alf: I need "realistic" textures for at least the prominent buildings. Maybe I should edit my list as this: 1.- Get tons of pictures of the buildings. 1a.- Decide which buildings are prominent so they get virtualize in a realistic way. 2.- Get geolocation for each building. 3.- Create the 3D models for each building and texturize'em (important buildings get realistic models, others no so much) 4.- Put each finished 3D model in its correct geolocation in the virtual world. 5.- Done!! About those shape files you were talking, I don't really get it. If you're talking about getting them form the web I don't think I will get them, I'm planning to virtualize a Mexican port, so there are no much information on line. Thanks again.

Co-founder of AulaTI.net , Donde lo dificil de la tecnologia se hace facil.

Monday, February 22 2010 @ 06:10 PM EST

Hello Most games that use 'real' cities tend to buy data from various companies, satelite imaging services, lidar data generators, etc... To get every single building correct by doing your own modeling and texturing would be highly time consuming. So for most low funded sims, if the building is not truely important to the game they will use a lot of 'filler' buildings. One apartment flat looks a lot like another. They choose which buildings are truely needed for the player to interact with, and only fully research and accrurately construct those buildings. You might get some help from local city planning departments. Many have overhead line views of their city. So using splines you can trace the outline of a building, then extrude it upwards(most such maps will not have height data and you'll need to locate that information elsewhere). These maps also tend to have road layouts so you can do the same for the roadways. One note with the current state of security caution a lot of places that once supplied such data freely now restrict access to such information. But it does not hurt to try. Mr. D Try your local city hall, water dept, electrical provider, etc... Some may even have blueprints of certain buildings available for free or purchase. Also check to see if you can find which construction firm built a specific building to see if they have data available.

Thursday, April 15 2010 @ 08:09 AM EDT

and don't forget Google 3D WareHouse