We’re very excited to announce the Ürban PAD ShareIt! Special. For two weeks, we're offering Ürban PAD for just $29. Unlocking this offer depends on you sharing it: once we hit our license goal, everyone will receive an Ürban PAD license at this special one-time price.

As we like to talk about on this blog, you can create great-looking 3D buildings and cities faster with Ürban PAD. Here are a few examples.

In the two years since we've started this blog, Ürban PAD has been used to build cities in next-generation game production pipelines, game prototypes ,industrial simulations, and architectural visualization. By offering Ürban PAD at this exceptional price, we hope to share with you the amazing power of procedural modeling.  

With Ürban PAD, you can:

• Create lots of buildings fast and sell them online.
• Make them look great with the top-notch texturing system or enhance them with Allegorithmic’s Substances (10 free Substances included).
• Fire up the city generator and let it roar to see your city appear in no time.
• Easily export your buildings or city to your favorite game engine (UDK/Unity 3D) or 3D software (Autodesk Suite).

The possibilities are endless. Show us what you can do - and don't forget to share! 

 

We're pleased to bring you the latest version in the Ürban PAD 3.0 lineup, Ürban PAD 3.0.7c: Homunculus. This version contains a number of bugfixes for version 3.0.7b: Dracolich.

Homunculus is now available for download and comes packaged with an updated version of the Simplicity sample city. Need help getting started? Find tips here on the blog or beginning tutorial videos on our YouTube channel. 

Featured Gallery: Ürban PAD to Unreal's UDK 

François has been working hard these past few weeks to get our Ürban PAD to UDK export working. This feature is not yet included in the public release, but the export workflow has come a long way since we first used an Ürban PAD to UDK workflow. We're giving past city projects a UDK makeover while we're putting the finishing touches on the export/import pipeline. Featured here are Boris' medieval building and our Simplicity sample city: 

 

 

 

 

We're pleased to bring you the latest version in the Ürban PAD 3.0 lineup, Ürban PAD 3.0.7b: Dracolich. 

What's New in Tech

Some very neat stuff is in this new version: 

New Line Split Option City Designer 

We’re adding a new split to the Transformation rules in City Designer with the new Simple Split:

Use the Simple Split transformation rule to draw angled roads. This feature is useful for creating dead ends and other non-regular roads.

 V-Roof Rule Added to Sector Editor

You asked for it, so we delivered: V-shaped roofs are now available. Simply select V-Roof Rule in the Sector Editor catalog to make a perfect V-shaped roof without having to extrude and merge surfaces. 

Editing in Pseudo-Place

Ever wanted to tweak a building template while in City Editor and see the changes immediately in the footprint? The editing in pseudo-place feature opens the template in Sector Editor with a view of the city footprint. This is quick and useful for seeing how your changes will apply locally. See our Featured Video below to get a sneak preview of this feature still under development.

The 3.0.7b version is now available for download and comes packaged with an updated version of the Simplicity sample city. Need help getting started? Find tips on the blog or beginning tutorial videos on our YouTube channel.

Featured Video: Editing in Pseudo-Place

Being able to edit building templates from from any part of Ürban PAD with action-stack processing is one of the features that makes Ürban PAD a flexible 3D modeling solution. Even better is seeing how your edits look with their current sector footprint. With the editing in pseudo-place feature, preview your changes locally before applying them. Here's a sneak preview: 

 

 

 

Note: This morning we found the boss's post abandoned except for an empty M&Ms bag, a map of the Provençal backcountry, and some cryptic text on his screen:      

Boris had a temper, so I gave him a target.

Boris is our graphic artist. It took him a while to find what he wanted to do in his life. He had done a lot of jobs, you see. Some blue collar, some white collar. None of them gave the deep satisfaction of the craft you want to perfect for the rest of your life. And then he had this graphic art job. It was a get-a-bit-of-money job at first. But it affected him strangely. He was swung between pure bliss when something was done and pure anger when the tools got in the way. He had this image in his mind and wanted it on the screen, and, damn if it took some sweat, he would get there in the end.

He realized later that he had found his craft. Boris is more experienced now but his internal creative spirit still works the same way. He draws and designs as others fight. He may be the reincarnation of a Viking warrior. Exchange the axe for Photoshop/3DSMAX and you get the idea. And when something is well done, he goes for a smoke outside the building. In the blistering heat. We're having a hot summer this year.  

So when he told me he had a bit of time, I gave him a target: a TurboSquid building:

The plan was simple: redo the building using Ürban PAD and show how, when you do it this way, you finish the building more quickly and can turn it into an infinity of buildings.

 

He said "grumpf" and walked away with a dark glint in his eyes. You can see the image below.

I'd say 'mission accomplished.' The building was created quickly and easily and the variations are only a click away. It was a good thing. Boris almost smiled. What do you think?

Yesterday, when I asked him if he wanted to see this blog post, he said "no, whatever, pfff" and turned to his screen. He had a new target. 

This week: We're rolling out Boris' buildings on TurboSquid. Some are free; others are available for a small charge. All of them are handsome, good-looking, and waiting to be used in your game or simulation. 

 

 

 

We're pleased to bring you the latest version in the Ürban PAD 3.0 lineup, Ürban PAD 3.0.7a: Stone Golem.

What's New in Tech

Ürban PAD 3.0.7a introduces several new features:

New Line Split Options in City Designer 

Two new line split options are now available by popular request:

• Use Line Split transformation rule to draw roads freehand inside the city surface. Use Points Edition mode to add spline for a freestanding, fully editable road: 

• New Recursive Split transformation to create regular, recursively smaller splits along the city surface grid: 

Accurate Texturing in Sector Editor with Auto-Orientation

• New auto-orientation option on texturing in Sector Editor aligns textures relative to their layer orientations.
• Each building of a building group now has its own texture orientation, making texturing of building groups more realistic and accurate.

The 3.0.7a version is now available for download and comes packaged with an updated version of the Simplicity sample city.

Need help getting started? Find tips on the blog or beginning tutorial videos on our YouTube channel.

Featured Video: UP to Unity Workflow

We've been fans of the Unity 3D engine for a while, and with this release, we've put the finishing touches on a basic workflow that takes you from Ürban PAD to Unity.

Quickly create procedural buildings or cities in Ürban PAD and take advantage of Unity's powerful features to make them sharp and game-ready. This video shows you how to get from here to there.

 

 

 

The Ineov symposium, focused on Green IT and user-centered innovation, is taking place from June 6-7 in Grenoble. More information about the symposium is available here (Fr/En). Participants who want to attend virtually can do so via a 3D web platform created in collaboration with GaeaNova and yours truly at Gamr7. Looking good!

Almost finished! Today we tackle the roof of our medieval building, which in this building refers to the composed upper part of the model. The roof (the topmost part of the upper level) took about a day, and randomizing the pike placement took less than 5 minutes: 

 

Using a procedural modeler gives us two completely different results. We build once, then regenerate for instant variation. In modeling terms, this means we get more looks for less work. As you can see in the second image, we created the roof as one sector, the addition as another sector, and used the Sector Link function to connect the two.

We also added some randomization to the mix by making the addition appear only half the time (this is the Maybe rule in the Filter rules of the Sector Editor catalogue, which is pretty handy if you want some quick, easy variation).

When this sector is linked to the sector we created in Part 2, the resulting medieval house can be used as a centerpiece or combined with other models to create a larger scene.

Postmortem: since the ground floor stayed the same (except for the archway), we saved the most time on the upper level.

In the middle photo you can see the upper level by itself. This can be used as a separate building. We're thinking about continuing this project – either making a deformable building, or regenerating this one building a few times to populate a scene with a small village (there is a possible door on the upper level).

We're pretty happy with the results, which took approximately 2.5 days to create - under our time limit - but what else could we have done to make it better or more interesting?  

Following up on last week's post, here's the first part of the upper level of our medieval building:

In this part of the building, we used more procedural features of Ürban PAD to get a bit of easy diversity. For basic uses, this means we can easily include variety in wall textures, window geometry, and props position. Modelling procedurally speeds up the work so that you don't have to create the same geometry manually or place the same prop at a different location over and over again.

We regenerated this level a few times to get some variation.  When we regenerated the geometry, the door and window placements changed. So did the sign position: 

From the Gamr7 vault, here’s a little project we worked on back in March. The renders were featured on our Artilinki space, and here we’ll go into a little more detail about how we built the building with this post series.

The original model (above) was a medieval building with a basic ground floor and a more detailed upper level. 

Our goals:

 

• Reproduce the ground floor with the arched doorway
• Design a multi-level top with changing window positions and types
• Randomize asset placement : sign, lamps, and roof deco
• Blender render
• Get it done in less than 3 days. 

First step: creating textures and 3 meshes for this building - lamps, sign, and pikes. All geometry was created with Sector Editor. We used assets we already had on hand for this project, so no creation time was involved. 

Creating the geometry itself took about 2 hours. Here's the first image: 

The Shape rules came in handy for creating the arched doorway, while we used random extrusion to offset the stones from the doorway, making them look a little more authentic. Not bad for 2 hours' work.

 

 

We're pleased to bring you the latest version in the Ürban PAD 3.0 lineup, Ürban PAD 3.0.4a: Skeleton Warrior.

What's New in Tech 

Ürban PAD 3.0.4 introduces several new features:

Context Features

* Add context to templates to customize them for flexible reuse with Sector Linking  

* Easily change template parameters easily to save time on content creation

Enhanced Export Options

* Ürban PAD now exports to Autodesk's .fbx format

* Use new grid packing feature to work more easily with sector and city object groups in your 3D software

The 3.0.4a version is now available for download and comes packaged with an updated version of the Simplicity sample city. 

Need help getting started? Find tips on the blog or beginning tutorial  videos on our YouTube channel.

Featured Video: UP to Unity Workflow

We've been fans of the Unity 3D engine for a while, and with this release, we've put the finishing touches on a basic workflow that takes you from Ürban PAD to Unity. Quickly create procedural buildings or cities in Ürban PAD and take advantage of Unity's powerful features to make them sharp and game-ready. This video shows you how to get from here to there.

Get Arty with UP 

We've had a gallery up for a while with our friends Artilinki, a social network dedicated to art-sharing. The Gamr7 gallery is a central hub for UP works-in-progress, as well as archives of cities past. Drop by and let us know what you think, or get your own Artilinki space and add us to your contacts!