Building by Numbers: Automated Architecture

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Building By Numbers from Kisa Naumova on Vimeo.

The movie above illustrates Kisa Naumova's work to recreate 27 floors of the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design.

Kisa used a series of architects' drawings, traced out in Illustrator, and subsequently run through custom made scripts to automatically build the prims in exactly the right places, at the right sizes and rotations. Once in place tweaks were made by hand allowing the building to be completed in 2 days.

The process of importing site plans to automate the building process is intriguing, it points to the future whereby blue prints will be automatically imported and constructed in virtual space.

City Generator: Subversion Game from Introversion

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Introversion, the guys behind Darwinia and Defcon are currently working on 'Subversion' which features an in-game city generator.

Currently running at over 70,000 buildings generated in approximately one minute the generator is the latest in a series of developments in 'automatic architecture' in games.

The YouTube movie embedded below provides a look at a city being generated:



See It's all in your head, Part 8 (the developers blog) for more details and screenshots.

We picked this one up via the ever readable http://kotaku.com/

Automatic Architecture: The CityEngine

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Pedro Martins emailed us a link to the 'CityEngine' by Pascal Mueller a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Computer Vision Lab of the ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

The CityEngine is focused on the procedural modeling of buildings and brings together the term 'Automatic Architecture' that is becoming increasingly common in the industry. We will have more on Automatic Architecture and work coming out research labs in Japan in a future post.

The YouTube demo reel below details Pascal's work on Pompeii and general cityscapes, its it both fascinating and impressive at the same time - bearing in mind all of this is automatic:



Take a look at the CityEngine wiki for more info, including SIGGRAPH papers.

Its not surprising to hear that Google is interested in procedural city modelling techniques and i would expect to see Pompeii and other historic reconstructions in Google Earth sometime soon.