How do you design a City?

What is this city for? You'd pretty much never want to put a realistic city into a game; you either want to design it around the way it is supposed to function for the player, or around the way it is supposed to look if the player can't actually wander through it.

It is for a free roaming game I want to make. actually not much of a game, just something I want to try. I have an iron man character that I want to use to fly around a city.

I have an iron man character

Best not to refer to your character by a trademarked name.

You create a few major roads, throw some grids of different sizes and orientations so that they fit the big roads, then throw in some more big roads but so that they fit to the existing stuff, then some more grids.

Then you go and erase a bunch of roads to get some trees in there, add curvy roads because theyre cool, maybe a town square and a hospital and a train track somewhere etc.

Then you go and try to connect all the mismatched grids in a sane way.

You could also think about how the city grew and see if that helps at all. Like if there at first were just a bunch of small roads connecting a few small areas of importance, which then had grids of new buildings added.

There's a plugin for 3dsmax called Greeble, which can generate city blocks for you. You should still do some planning yourself, but this makes it easier to populate your scene with buildings more quickly. Also great for just creating a quick mockup to get it working, then you can refine the scene later on.

Have a look here: http://max.klanky.com/plugins.htm

And here's a tutorial:

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Here is a video on how to model a city using Blender, it uses a particle system to clone buildings. Even though you are using 3DS max, it is likely that you can do the same thing once you see how the technique works. http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/how-to-create-a-city/

Blender City Generator makes a city with one button.

Here's a video I made of one with no textures and some interesting lighting:

This one has simple textures:

This one I made by hand for fun.

What is this city for? You'd pretty much never want to put a realistic city into a game; you either want to design it around the way it is supposed to function for the player, or around the way it is supposed to look if the player can't actually wander through it.

Good point.

Cinematic cut-scene maybe?