Ok, everyone. This is really exciting as I finally managed to include some automatic UV texturing into my QTown script. I wanted to do this from the beginning but after I was done with the first version there was not enough brain left to think about how to texture the resulting geometry. But eventually I wrapped my head around it and came up with a solution that works quite nicely.

So in a nutshell the texturing is drawn from several pre-defined tileable images and applied to the surfaces in a way that the tiling will never break at the edges. The tiling can also be adjusted from the UI after building the geometry, as the texturing is dependent on the size of the base plane the buildings are created from. An automatic creation of a base plane is also included as well as the creation of shaders and file texture nodes. The user can choose from having the materials created as standart blinn, mia x-passes or vray (of course the plugins need to be loaded for these additional shaders). I also included the creation of gamma correction applied to the file nodes to quickly support linear workflow.

The basic script itself has gotten a makeover as well – some functions are now processed faster resulting in an overall better performance of the script. I took out the option to work with curved surfaces as the new version creates the buildings in a different fashion and I found that I hardly ever used this function. If there is a need for it – just go back to the first version.

So, all in all I think it’s a huge improvement and I am excited to play with it during the next couple of weeks. After that I will of course make it available to the public but until then it’s playtime for me :)

The images shown above are created with the new version of QTown, based on a 8 x 8 plane and with the new preset settings for “Suburb”, “Medium”, “Downtown”, applied three times each. The resulting pieces were scattered using the polyScatter script and then rendered with VRay. The images are slightly color corrected but with no other post processing. The setup time to build the city from scratch was below 5 minutes.

Here’s a short clip from a rendered animation. The city in this clip is not modified in any way but only rendered with a sun & sky system with a little bit of compositing to refine the look.

This is a quick timelapse to show the QTown 2.0 script for maya in action. (Original clip time is 17 minutes)

The only manual step is adjusting the generated district geometry to achieve some uneven surface to build the city on. For this a plane is setup as a wrap deformer for the automatically generated geometry to be able to sculpt the landscape. The resulting deformed districts are then used to generated the buildings.

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