I wrote this simple generator as part of a test. It leverages max internal functions for basic shape generation which can be used as Input.
It has some basic features to generate roads from a given shape, district randomization and build distribution. The buildings themselves are instanced and can be easily replaced by proper assets or procedural buildings from a library. For this example the amount of buildings is limited to 5 and I just use simple blocks for demonstration.
The tool itself comes with a short how-to section, so it’s pretty self-explanatory and not further described here.
The Open TopoInterface button in the top left corner opens the Topology menu of 3ds Max. By default it’s a little bit hidden to find but it’s quite useful to quickly generate random shapes on a surface. For the tool I spared the time to create a similar function by myself, as this one already covers the needs.
The other functionality inside the Input shapes group is the shape generator from an input map.
To use it, a plane with a material and a high contrast texture is required. The colorpicker is used to determine a threshold/contrast.
Map-scaling will scale the generated map larger than 1:1 if set.
Clicking the generate shape button will convert the found pixels into points for further processing.
Currently this tool is not further developed, but the goal was to convert the points then into polygon shapes.