Power Lines for Procedural Cities

I've made a lot of recent progress on 3DWorld's procedural cities, in particular the residential neighborhoods. They've definitely improved over the past few months as I've added fences, swimming pools, etc.

I walked around outside in my real life neighborhood to try and observe what objects I was missing in my scenes. One type item that stood out was telephone poles. I can add these as well as the wires that distribute power along the roads in my cities. Since I'm only going to create the power lines for now, and not the telephone wires, I'll call these "power poles" for the remainder of this post to match the name I use in the source code.

I started by adding wooden poles along one side of the road in both north-south and east-west directions. A single pole is placed halfway between each block/plot in each dimension, and a pole is placed in the corner of each intersection to connect the wires running in orthogonal directions. Then I added wooden cross beams to the tops of each pole to hold the wires. These are at different heights for each N-S/E-W direction at the corner pole to keep the wires from intersecting and shorting out.

Next, I added the wires themselves. A set of three high voltage wires run across the tops of the poles, while a stack of three low voltage wires are spaced vertically below them. I modeled wires as long thin black cubes. Making them pure black avoids having any shading that varies with lighting calculated from the vertex normals. This makes it impossible to tell that these are cubes rather than cylinders, unless you're looking into the square cross section of the end of the wire. Wires are attached to the pole and cross beams with white ceramic insulating standoffs. These are only drawn when the player is close as an optimization.

Power poles at intersections that connect wires running in the two directions have additional wires that connect the upper and lower set of three high voltage lines. They also have a transformer with connections between the high voltage and low voltage sets of wires. All of this produces a fully connected and electrically sound power grid. Real power grids don't have redundant connections that create loops, but this is close enough.

Finally, I connect houses and streetlights to the low voltage power lines with additional wires. Houses connect to points near the closest power pole. Streetlights connect to the closest low voltage wires, which are generally either the ones directly above the streetlight or directly across the street from it. The thinner wires connecting houses and streetlights to the low voltage power lines are drawn as a single wire rather than three separate wires to simplify the code. This effectively treats them as three bundled wires braided/wrapped around a steel support cable, as is common in residential areas. This multi-wire is connected to the three wires stretching between poles with a short vertical wire segment.

Here is an example of my power poles and power lines viewed at street level. I think I have the basic scales and styles pretty close to the reference images I used of real power lines.

Power lines connecting to houses and streetlights as viewed from the ground.

Everything is drawn with level of detail (LOD) based on a combination of object size and distance to the camera so that smaller objects are only drawn when the player is close by. In addition, cylinders and truncated cones are drawn with fewer vertices/divisions when further from the player. I use the bounding cubes of groups of wires and the poles themselves for view frustum culling to avoid drawing components that aren't visible to the player. The average draw time for all of these additional features is only around 1.5% of the total scene draw time.

One tricky problem was handling the power poles on the edges and corners of the grid. This can only happen for the poles placed at the corners of intersections as the remaining poles are placed on the interior of the city blocks. These power poles must be handled as special cases because the wires only connect in a subset of the directions and must be properly terminated at insulating standoffs. Poles on the edges connect with wires in three directions rather than four, while poles on the four corners of the grid only connect in two directions. In addition, the wires connecting to the transformer and between the upper and lower high voltage triplets must be moved to the direction of the pole facing the interior of the city. This allows the vertical connecting wires to connect properly to wires above and below.

Here's a second example, viewed from above with the camera in "flight" mode. Can you actually tell that these wires are cubes rather than cylinders? I can't.

Power line grid following roads, viewed from above.

This looks pretty good for now. I may add larger metal transmission lines connecting the different cities to each other at some point in the future. I don't have any generators or other sources of power to connect these to at this time. I haven't decided what to do about commercial cities with office buildings yet because the power lines are more likely to intersect with the larger buildings. Maybe it's okay to assume these cities use underground power lines and omit the poles.