An application that generates a low poly city in godot within a grid.
The application generates a city with simple geometry. Every mesh is generated individually based on parameters. It uses smooth Simplex noise to simulate a population density.
I used the Godot game engine because it was required to be used. It was required because this was an academic project for the "3D real-time programming" module. Also the ArrayMesh and SurfaceTool Classes were useful and helped me better understanding how vertices and surfaces work in computer vision.
I faced many problems. My fist approach was to generate all surfaces within one mesh but I dropped the idea really fast. Then I often had the problem that some of my scenes (houses) were not at all generated or spawned at the wrong location (0, 0, 0). Also the programming for the combination logic of the blocks was quite a hustle. But after all it works! Possible enhancements would be implementing a better transition between houses and the scyscrapers, a new block type "industry" and after all the generation not in a grid, but based of junction locations (in my project defined as knot).
To get the project working you need Godot version 4.2.2 stable installed on your machine.
Simply run the project via the project manager from godot or run the project within the editor. When the program is running you can set the parameters as you wish in th UI and press the "Generate" button to generate the city. It might take longer to build if you don't have a graphics card due to each individual draw call!
For understanding the logic of generating a city I have read the paper "Procedural city generation using Perlin noise" by Niclas Olsson and Elias Frank (Faculty of Computing, Blekinge Institute of Technology, June 2017). I tried to implement the logic of districts, blocks and buildings as it's definition in the paper. Due to the small time frame in which the project had to be finished, I simplified some of the logic and decided to generate districs only in grids.
Here is the paper available: http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1119094/FULLTEXT02.pdf
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2024 Bastian Weiler
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Attached is a presentation and a documentation of the project. But only in german!