I am one of the founders of this company! Happy to answer any questions that crop up.
Do you have a model of the twin towers within it?
3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#12This needs to be in an Assetto Corsa mod. If I could race around a vr NYC with traffic to weave through, I'd be so happy.
We just hosted a GameJam on itch and.... you definitely aren't the only one thinking that: https://itch.io/jam/new-york-new-york/entries
Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#13Does it include all boroughs, or just Manhattan?
all boroughs!
Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#14Are the building textures from photos? It looks a lot cleaner than I remember NYC being.
We are doing inverse procedural modeling rather than photogrammetry, so there will be some idealization/iconification that takes place - but this also allows end-users to bring in their own material libraries in a pretty seamless way.
This page [1] gives a bit of an overview of this technique, which was new to me:
Inverse procedural modeling discovers a procedural representation of an existing geometric model and the discovered procedural model then supports synthesizing new similar models.
Not sure what the "discovers" actually means, need to find a better reference ... This page [2] summarizes the method like this:
We propose an inverse modeling approach for stochastic trees that takes polygonal tree models as input and estimates the parameters of a procedural model so that it produces trees similar to the input.
So I guess that's roughly the same, then. I still don't quite understand it, if you have to manually model a building, and then get a procedural model's parameter out of that, you still had to model it (=do a lot of work)? Is the benefit that you then can store the parameters and use the model to regenerate the building, thus compressing the representation a bunch?
Cool project anyway, makes me long for NYC! :)
[1]: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/urban/urban-procedural-mode...
Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like their core business model is modular asset packs, not necessarily tied to real world environments? Potentially some overlap, but I would guess it's unlikely we would be going head-to-head with them in most customer use cases.
Have you 3D printed any of the buildings in your data-set? Specifically bridges, and would it be easy to extract just bridges from your set?
Yes, we generate water-tight meshes for buildings that are 3D printable (and terrain can be made 3D printable pretty easily). Bridges are one of the weak-points in our current reconstruction process - the gnarlier bits of 3D road network inference is implemented internally, but there's a bit more work to get make the output pretty enough to pass through to end-users.
Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#16Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are doing inverse procedural modeling rather than photogrammetry, so there will be some idealization/iconification that takes place - but this also allows end-users to bring in their own material libraries in a pretty seamless way.
This page [1] gives a bit of an overview of this technique, which was new to me: Inverse procedural modeling discovers a procedural representation of an existing geometric model and the discovered procedural model then supports synthesizing new similar models. Not sure what the "discovers" actually means, need to find a better reference ... This page [2] summarizes the method like this: We propose an inverse modeling…
Our inverse procedural modeling process produces 3D models representing/explaining the structures we see in our input sensor data, so it doesn't require hand-modeling first.
> Is the benefit that you then can store the parameters and use the model to regenerate the building, thus compressing the representation a bunch?
A few benefits - we can automatically generate the mesh model at different levels of detail by stripping out elements of the procedural recipe (rather than relying on mesh decimation which gives ugly results). And yeah, compression + error-correction also play a role. Plus compared to photogrammetric models, we have the metadata needed for interactive lighting/simulation.
Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#18It'd be fun to have a digital twin of metro Atlanta that allows me to customize and visualize what it'd look like if I ripped out all the roads and replaced them with grass-tracked trolleys and bike trails. Maybe extend The Plane Train from the airport to my house.
Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#19I am one of the founders of this company! Happy to answer any questions that crop up.
Can I use them in Roblox? My daughter loves to play with it and Roblox Studio, and having more assets to use (buildings and pre-built places she could modify) would be awesome.
Re: 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
#20I am one of the founders of this company! Happy to answer any questions that crop up.
Can I use them in Roblox? My daughter loves to play with it and Roblox Studio, and having more assets to use (buildings and pre-built places she could modify) would be awesome.
There are some limitations with getting big mesh models into Roblox but it's definitely possible - I'll ask if my engineer who's been working on testing that if he has recommendations.