Cityscape

This project was inspired by Donald Crews' book Flying. My wife had gotten the book for our son, but having loved Truck as a child, I fell in love with the style and thought it would be fun to spend a weekend writing a program to generate a city in his style.

As I worked on an algorithm to divide a blocks into lots, I realized that rather than a topic for a weekend project, it really a topic for a PhD thesis. Fortunately. Tom Kelly has already written that thesis, and it's fascinating. His survey of procedural modeling techniques gave me a ton of ideas and he's included an algorithm for using the block's straight skeleton to partitioning it into lots.

The goal of this project is an app that will accept a series of roads, and generate a city of buildings in Crews' style, around them. I decided to use the CGAL library for its straight skeleton and that forced me to learn a lot about C++ templates, which slowed my progress. But as I've started to discover how to use it, I found the breadth of CGAL's functionality to be amazing. It may not do it fast, but it'll do it accurately.

Installation

Clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/drewish/Cityscape.git

Install my triangulate-3d branch of Cinder 0.9.1dev in a sibling directory:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/drewish/Cinder.git -b triangulate-3d
Cinder/xcode/fullbuild.sh

Install CGAL 4.11 using homebrew:

brew install cgal

Open the app up in Xcode:

open Cityscape/xcode/Cityscape.xcodeproj