00:02Welcome.

00:03Do want to learn how to...

00:04...procedural model building using the CGA shape grammar in the CityEngine?

00:09Well, then this tutorial is for you.

00:12You will write your first CGA rule file.

00:16And you will get to know the Rule Editor inside the CityEngine...

00:19...and, in the end, you will create a building that looks like this one in here.

00:24So, let's start from scratch and delete this one and create a new CGA grammar file.

00:36Now, it's already open here.

00:38So, to figure out at what rule we have to start...

00:41...you need to know the shapes envelope of this lot that we want to place the building on.

00:48So bring up the inspector and locate the ShapeSymbol here which is called "Lot."

00:52So, our first rule needs to be, "Lot."

00:57So we're going to do this...

01:00...and, with the first rule, all we do is just create a volume out of our Lot.

01:05So we do an extrude and showing you one of the nice features here of the Rule Editor...

01:10...which is, by pressing CTRL+SPACE, you get the command completion, which lists...

01:16...you all the features that there are and the parameters, so in case you're unsure...

01:21...about the naming and the parameters, you can always use this...

01:25...it's a good help to start with the shape grammar.

01:28I'm going to use the second one here.

01:31And enter a value of 11 units.

01:35I now have to assign our new rule file to the Lot.

01:42And I'm going to extrude for the first time.

01:45I am going to generate for the first time.

01:47So you see, this extruded volume here with the height of 11 units -- our first generation.

01:56Now, it's always a good idea to use attributes instead of absolute numbers in the rules.

02:02So, I'm going to add a new attribute called "Height," with a value of 11...

02:09...and replace this absolute number here with the attribute.

02:13I can generate again there won't be any difference because we have the same height.

02:17But if you look at inside the Inspector again, you see that here there's a new line...

02:23...the attribute height that we declared here is appearing here.

02:29And so it's very easy later on to change the height, for example, here in the Inspector.

02:35Okay, let's get on.

02:37We have to trigger a second rule now called "Building."

02:45And from now on I'm going to copy and paste rules so I don't have to type them.

02:49So this second rule, called "Building."

02:53We'll do a component split on this volume.

02:56So what it does is it gets from volume-to-face as we take all the side faces of our volume...

03:02...and trigger the Sidefacade rules on them.

03:05I'm going to save and generate the building again using the shortcut CTRL+G now...

03:13...and you see that now we only have the side facades.

03:15We don't care about the roof at the moment.

03:18Okay, let's head over to head over to the next rule: Sidefacade.

03:29You can see here that I again declared two new attributes...

03:32...called "groundfloor height," with the value of 4 and "floor height" with a value of 3.

03:37And the new Sidefacade rule?

03:40What does it do?

03:41It splits our facade vertically; marked by this y here into a ground floor...

03:50...and into floors.

03:51Note the asterisk mark here, which stands for a repeating split.

03:57This means that the upper floors are repeated as many times as they fit in.

04:04Note also the tilde sign here which marks that...

04:08...this floor height should only be matched approximately, so...

04:12...just make sure that the floors exactly fill the volume...

04:18...so floor height might differ a bit from the 3 meters due to the tilde character.

04:26Okay, and it's always a good thing to add some color in here just for testing purposes...

04:35...so what I do here is I added the red color on the GroundFloor so we will see... 59 00:04:42,700 --> 00:04:45,666 ...that this really is the GroundFloor as it is.

04:45And to show you how important the repeating split is, I'm going to...

04:51...make the building a bit higher now.

04:53Let's make it 21 instead of 11.

04:56Regenerate, and you see how the repeating split creates as many floors as fitting.

05:04Okay, let's change this back again.

05:07Regenerate back to normal.

05:10Okay, we go on with the floor rule.

05:23Again, a new attribute, tile width and the floor is again a split rule.

05:29This time horizontally, marked by the x.

05:32It splits every floor into a wall area, then a repeating tile area, and a wall area again.

05:41Save the rule, regenerate, and you see how our facade now has these wall areas here...

05:48...every floor has this wall area and the repeating tile elements.

05:57We will now go on and subdivide the tiles further.

06:06Again, a split in x and a split in y this time combined into one rule.

06:15What it does is just divides a single tile...

06:18...even more into wall elements and this window element here.

06:24Okay, now coming to the window rule.

06:35For this, look at have a short look here into the assets; do you see this window.obj?

06:42You can preview this in the inspector.

06:45The is a pre-modeled asset modeled outside of the CityEngine.

06:49And we want to insert this element here in our window area.

06:55So, what we need to do first is declare a new variable called, "window asset..."

07:01...which has here the path to this .obj file.

07:06And, as a second step, we're going to write a new rule called "window."

07:16And insert the window asset.

07:24And you see that this is not placed correctly...

07:28...so, what we do is, we do a small translation, minus set direction...

07:40...regenerate our building; this was too far, this looks quite good.

07:50Okay, so we already have a facade with some window elements in...

07:54...but now we want to have textures on the windows.

07:57Let's head over again to our asset folder and open the textures.

08:02See the window1.tif.

08:05See this texture we want to insert?

08:07On the windows?

08:11So again we define a new variable.

08:15Up here, called "window text," with a path to our texture.

08:20And we use the color map command to declare a texture.

08:27This one here; just before we insert the asset.

08:31Save the rule.

08:32Regenerate.

08:33And we have textures on the windows.

08:37Now the tutorials have shown how the rest of the facade texture as well.

08:41I'm going to skip this for now and just load this rule file and regenerate.

08:53And you see how their additional texture, mainly on the wall elements...

08:58...these are actually two layers of texture...

09:01...a dirt map with some dirt here on the floor and on the roof.

09:05And the brick texture on all elements.

09:11Now if you look at the polygon count here.

09:14This is quite a high polygon count coming from this complex asset here.

09:18So we're going to now create another version of this building with less detail.

09:25We're going to exchange this asset here with a normal texture plane.

09:32So I'm going to open up this Rule File here.

09:36And head over to the Window rule look at here the Outline...

09:42...that lists all the rules so you can easily jump to the Window rule.

09:47Okay, now what we do is...

09:51...we create a new attribute called "LOD," for "Level of Detail,' and declare it to 1.

09:57Now in the Window rule, you want to quickly be able to switch between the level of details.

10:02So we make a conditional rule in the window rule.

10:07So, let's say in the case in case that Level of Detail is bigger than 1, and bigger than 0...

10:15...we just use our old rule just inserting the asset.

10:35All we do is define material...

10:41...I'm going to define this texture here shortly; copied from the old rule.

10:54Here we go.

10:55So what we do is define the texture to be used here, but we don't do any...

11:00...any inserts of window assets.

11:02We need to set up the UVs because we don't have an asset yet.

11:04And "bake" it; please refer to the tutorial for details about that.

11:09Now, we have this new attribute here that we can switch here, so...

11:15...instead of using Level of Detail 1, the high resolution version is switched to 0.

11:25We regenerate the building and watch out for the windows.

11:29They're exchanged with normal planes here.

11:32You can go to the on texture mode to see this more detailed.

11:41Okay, as a last step now, we will add some random variation to our buildings.

11:48So go over to the scene, select delete this model; select some more lots here.

12:11Say, if we generate them now...

12:17...they all have the same height and are totally identical, which is not too realistic.

12:21So, we're going to bring up the rule set and change the height parameter...

12:30...to a random value going from 11 to 30, and reselect our block.

12:40Regenerate the buildings and you see how they get different heights.

12:44You can also test this on a single building by using the wand here.

12:51Every time you hit the wand, a new random seed is generated...

12:55...and the new random value for height is created.