Description
Pixelactive Cityscape Overview
Pixelactive Cityscape is a tool for quick modeling of the urban landscape. CityScape allows you to simplify the process of creating city elements and concentrate your efforts on the design of the scene.
CityScape’s unique feature set allows users to create large-scale environments faster than with traditional modeling tools.
Pixelactive Cityscape Features
Rapid development of urban landscapes
Creation of complex road networks with highways, intersections, bridges, overpasses, interchanges, dead ends. Filling cities with buildings, trees, power lines, imported elements manually or automatically.
Active settings
Easy changes to terrain geometry, road networks, and other elements at any stage of construction.
Traffic
Traffic data is procedurally generated from the road network and is automatically updated when changes are made to the road layout.
File format support (Demo – export is not supported)
Data formats 3ds Max, Maya, COLLADA, OpenFlight 16.3, GIS (shape files, topography, projections, building plans).
Support for the commercial game engine
CityScape supports data exchange with Emergent’s Gamebryo 2.6.
Multi-user support
Development on a single project can be distributed among several users at the same time, while CityScape will combine changes made by different clients in a single scene.
Notes
This is a demo version of the program, which until a certain point was available on the official website for free download. However, in the fall of 2010, the project was bought by NAVTEQ, after which the site was blocked for users, all branded videos about the program’s operation disappeared from YouTube, and downloading Cityscape demo became impossible.
The full version of the program cost about $19,000 and, apparently, has never appeared on the Internet in any access and is unlikely to appear. A note flashed across one foreign forum that Cityscape Pro takes up more than 30 GB of space and is supplied on a Blu-ray disc with a hardware protection flash drive; the main place of this volume belongs to three-dimensional objects and ready-made models of cities (for example, New York). For such a price, it is unlikely that an ordinary user would buy it, and even more so would start distributing it for free.
The demo version’s capabilities are not too limited compared to the full version; the main differences are the lack of landscape export to popular 3D formats and the limited size of the simulated territory (around several kilometers). Otherwise, the program is very powerful and is the most interactive program for modeling urban developments of all that I was able to find on the Internet (another powerful program of this kind is Cityengine). You can figure out the Cityscape interface in a couple of dozen minutes, and the results are, frankly speaking, impressive. Just take a ride on the created territory in a car or fly around it in a helicopter.
Possible malfunctions
If the graphics are displayed incorrectly, and the computer seems to meet all the necessary requirements, try to configure your video adapter. Set the maximum quality of graphics display; this setting helped me (ATI video adapter). In general, the program is quite functional, it most often glitches due to insufficient computer power or an unpredictable conflict with the OS and its settings.
File Information
Year/Release Date : 2010
Version : 1.8.6 Build 42339
Developer : PixelActive Inc.
Developer’s Website :http://pixelactive3d.com/ (the site no longer exists in its original form)
Bit depth : 32bit
Vista compatibility : full
Windows 7 compatibility : full
Interface language : English
Tablet : Not required
System Requirements
– Windows XP (32-bit or 64-bit), Service Pack 2 or higher
– Windows Vista (32-bit or 64-bit)
– Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit)
– Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher
– At least 200 MB of free hard disk space
– Video card with support for shader model 3.0 and DirectX 9 or higher
– At least 1 GB of RAM; 4 GB recommended (2 GB is fine)
– Monitor resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher
