CREATE CITYSCAPES WITH RAILCLONE

Paul Roberts takes us step by step through the process of producing an industrial city scene

in this tutorial, starting with a simple grid, we’ll demonstrate how to populate a city with three types of building, each showcasing a different technique. We’ll start with courtyard buildings, add towers that are automatically scaled and oriented to fill an entire city block, and finally fill blocks with multiple midsize commercial buildings.

All these techniques use Railclone, a procedural modelling tool from itoo Software. In addition to useful layout tools, Railclone is able to render enormous polygon counts, making it well suited for this kind of task. Don’t worry if you don’t have Railclone – you can use the free version downloadable from itoo Software’s website (itoosoft.

com). This Lite edition limits you to three source building models per Railclone object, but apart from that all the other techniques shown in this tutorial will work fine.

To populate the city you can use existing assets or model them yourself. In this tutorial, we’ll use buildings from Evermotion’s

(evermotion.org) extensive collections. The courtyard houses come from collection AM172, the towers from AM181, and the midsize commercial buildings from collection AM181. We will also use low-poly cars from AM132 to fill the roads. You can download a selection of free samples from Evermotion’s website.