CityEngine: Spiral cities

Pascal Mueller's Wiki has more information on the CityEngine project, including movies, lecture slides and more pictures of modelled cities. The pictures of the process are particularly interesting, as it shows the tiny steps involved.

Sci-fi fans should take a look at the Level City, while hardcore rendering fans should look at this detailed city render. Movies are also available, including a fly-through of the detailed city.

Pascal is also implicated in pop culture applications of technology through the collaborative media art project CoreBounce and live visuals group Scheinwerfer.

Example model of New York City, copyright CentralPictures

From ComputerGraphica: Yoav I H Parish and Pascal Müller from CentralPictures, Switzerland has created an impressive procedural model for modeling cities. Their technique is capable of simulating a complete city from a “comparatively small set of statistical and geographical input data”.

Parameters include elevation maps, land/water/vegetation maps, population density, zone maps (residential, commercial or mixed zones), street patterns and maximal house height maps.

From their abstract:

They have their original SIGGRAPH 2001 paper on the technique online:
CityEngine paper