city bits

Born out of the Rome Reborn project, CityEngine is a powerful tool for modeling entire cities in perfect detail. Because of its roots in art history the aims of the project are to render every building, not just the most important landmarks. Their digital model contains 200 monuments painstakingly modeled by art historians, and over 7,000 secondary buildings rendered parametrically. This ability to generate cities based on a shape grammar language is what makes the program unique, as they demonstrate in this video:

Paramteric design can be explained through this video, which shows how multiple building styles can be generated by tweaking the parameters on basic geometric primitives:

While these techniques are ideally suited to the special effects industry, they are slowly gaining clout in the architectural field where they allow an incredibly powerful way of systematically designing at any scale while ensuring consistency and favoring granularity.