Tutorials

Create cityscapes with 3ds Max and Railclone

01 create A city GRID

Start by laying out the city using 3ds Max’s built-in tools to create a closed spline for each city block. When designing the city, keep in mind that the techniques in this tutorial work best with rectilinear city blocks. Vertex types should be set to Corner for 90-degree bends, as these will be used by Railclone to add corners. For gradual changes in direction use Bezier or Smooth vertex types, but as we won’t be deforming geometry there’s a limit on how curved splines can be before adjacent buildings intersect.

02 DRAW or Detach A test AREA

Once your city has been created, it’s a good idea to make a smaller collection of splines you can use to test out your procedural styles. This way Forest Pack and Railclone won’t need to perform complex calculations on the entire city grid. Create a couple of rectangles and a straight spline and attach them so that they’re a single object. Next, merge your chosen assets into the scene.

03 PREPARE Geometry for use with Railclone

Railclone does not automatically consolidate materials and reassign IDS, so you will need to create a single Multi-sub Object material that can be applied to the source geometry. The material needs to work correctly on both the Railclone object and individual components. An easy way to consolidate materials is to attach the objects together into a mesh. By doing this, Max creates a Multi-sub Object material and reassigns IDS automatically. You can then detach each object into separate objects, centre and re-adjust the pivots.

04 create A Railclone object

Our first Railclone object will add buildings around the perimeter of a city block. Create a new Railclone object and open the Style Editor. Create an L1S Generator and wire a new Spline node to the Generator’s Spline input. Use the Spline node to select the test spline we created in Step 2. Create a Segment node and disable Slice and Bend to make sure full instancing is retained.

05 ADD the building Geometry

Right-click the Segment node and hit Clone Multiple. Select the building objects and click OK. Each will be loaded into a new segment with the same settings as the original. Wire the segments to a new Randomise node and wire the node to the generator’s Default input. The buildings are centred on the spline. To change this, wire a Transform node between the Random node and the Generator and use it to change the Y-alignment to Bottom. Wire an empty segment to the Corner input and set the Generator’s Bevel Mode to None.

06 understand Default modes

The way that Railclone distributes segments to fit along the spline can be controlled using the Default options found in the Generator’s Rules tab. In Tile mode, the segments are simply placed one after another along the Spline and the final segment is sliced to fit. Because we have disabled slicing though, the final segment will extend beyond the end of the spline.