Philosophy

The 10 Commandments of Ürban PAD

• Every city is unique.
• Ürban PAD is here to serve uniqueness and vision.
• Content creation is meant to be creative - not painful.
• Data should be reusable.
• Procedural design should open the possibilities for city creation - not restrict them.
• Procedural design software should save time and money without sacrificing quality or creative control.
• Prototyping is a unique phase rich with possibilities - not just a preliminary sketch.
• Import and export should be facilitated through the use of standard formats.
• No developer should ever be locked into any format or out of the developer’s own data.
• Full automation and full editability are not mutually exclusive.

The Content Creation Problem

Expansion of gaming into new formats and the coming wave of new hardware is driving the demand for a high volume of rich, dynamic urban content. While demand is rising exponentially, team sizes are increasing geometrically.

At this rate, content demand is catching up to and overtaking the design talent available to create high-quality content. Time and money are at stake in each project:

• Your city prototype is rejected. You have to go back to Square 1 and reconstruct the prototype.
• You realize too late that your roads are too narrow for the tanks in the war strategy game you are creating. You now have two choices: sacrifice game quality or remake the entire city on a 3-month delay.

Both problems are costly in terms of time and money. With the acceleration of production cycles and the shortening of project deadlines, the occurrence of similar situations will only increase in the future.

The Ürban PAD Solution

Ürban PAD is a procedural solution to the content creation problem. It a fully integral software package composed of:

• Four template Editors - graphic design tools for creating urban content
• City Designer - a fully automatic procedural city generator for placing the content in your urban environment

City creation in Ürban PAD occurs in two phases:

• Graphic design is handled by graphic designers working with the Editors.
• Level designers use City Designer to generate cities with the graphical content created in the Editors.

Dividing the workflow between two teams introduces parallelism into your workflow: all team members can move ahead on the project without waiting for others to catch up. You smooth out your pipeline while bringing your team’s operations into harmony.

You have access to your data at every step of the process - even after prototyping or production. You are never locked out of your data, and you can always import from and export to standard formats.

How Does Ürban PAD Work?

There are four basic steps to creating a city with Ürban PAD:

• Convert your own content into usable .egg files with the Mesh Converter. (See Mesh Converter.)
• Combine this content into templates for roads, crossroads, sectors (city blocks), and urban objects (houses, street decorations) with the four template Editors.
• Use City Designer to place these templates automatically in a city simulation.
• Export the final result to a Collada or XML file, or to a game engine.

Sample Workflow

Step 1

Import assets in .dae, .fbx, .kmz, .max, or .mb format using Ürban PAD’s Mesh Converter.

Step 2

Combine assets to create templates of urban content using content Editors.

Step 3

Run a city simulation using urban content templates.

See createcity25.

Step 4

If you wish, pause simulation and use manual editing features to fine-tune your city.

Step 5

Export city file to Collada.

See City Designer: Saving and Exporting City Simulations.

Step 6

Import the Collada file to a 3D software or game engine. (Here, we used Maya with openCollada plugins.)

Key Ürban PAD Ideas

Russian Dolls

The principle behind Russian dolls is the same one behind the workings of Ürban PAD. That principle is composability.

Russian dolls are series of hollow wooden dolls, each smaller than the other, that fit into each other. Likewise, meshes, textures, and other resources are transformed into Ürban PAD data stored in .egg format. These transformed assets are then assembled into discrete files called templates using the Editors:

These templates, which consist of roads, crossroads, activity parcels, and sectors (city blocks) are then assembled during city creation in City Designer.

These templates are stored in Ürban PAD’s .gcf format and can be exported to Collada or XML.

The Ürban PAD Editors & City Designer page contains more information about templates and the Ürban PAD Editors used to create them.

The Ürban PAD data that results from these combinations of resources and policy application and stored as templates can be recombined to create larger templates.

Common Data Compositions

Ürban PAD data can be composed in several ways.

Mesh Composition

At its most basic level, an Ürban PAD template can be composed from individual meshes and textures. Such is the example cited above in basic_house.gcf. Several different meshes have been combined to create an elementary parcel representing a single structure.

Parcel Links

Creating a parcel link inserts one parcel template into another parcel template or into a sector template, as illustrated by the preceding example.

Parcel links can be constituted of simple meshes to which policies have been applied or to complete objects.

Sector Links

Creating a sector link inserts a sector into a parcel:

• Create a sector in Sector Editor:

• Import the sector to Parcel Editor as a sector link:

• Apply a Geometry Scale Policy from the Positioning Policies menu, which will allow a clean expand:

• The imported sector now looks and behaves like a parcel:

Creating a sector link is necessary when creating sectors you wish to program into City Designer as activities. See Composability and Activities for more information.

Fillers

A rectangular filler policy can be applied to individual meshes or entire parcels. See the Creating Filled Spaces with Rectangular Filler Policy for more information.

Border Lines

Using a border line operator, you can create a boundary from a series of repeating meshes or parcels. In the parcel rich_house.gcf, available in the Ocean Isle City Project, a fence has been created around a house using the Border Line operation.

Vertical Line

Using Vertical Line, it is possible to create stacked procedural structures.

Summary

Ürban PAD data is easily composable by using operations to integrate individual objects and templates into larger or more complex templates. You can reuse your data at any time in different compositions, which enhances your team’s creative flexibility and range while reducing creation time.