I've been trying to find a city builder tool to assist in some previs with some generic city flybys.

the c4d plugin crashes,
lightwave greeble works, but randomly, and creates non instanced geometry (slooooow it down a bit will we?)
nothing good for max
no plugin for maya that didn't crash, two separate programs were arcane or crashed.

so I moved on to trying paint effects in maya
the first pic is using the couple of buildings in paint effects, the red and blue buildings are ones I copied to new brushes and altered the textures for to see if I could do that. It is a copy of existing mel scripts for the buildings with building facades from the net, and I think it might have slight displacement mapping on it because of the copying of the original citymesh mels

the second image is gnarly, but it is a building brush built from scratch in half an hour using the tube creation settings in the brush panel of the attributes editor. I have yet to figure out how to keep the objects from intersecting. Built the settings for the brush in about half an hour, drew the splines in about 30 seconds and renders each frame in about 3 seconds or less. Very fast actually.
paint effects can have displacement maps applied too. I didn't go into that as it requires a denser mesh setting to displace nicely and I wanted to make super fast previsualization quality. I believe the texture is the gray facade seen in the corner foreground of the first pic but tiled to a factor of 8.





you can open the .mel file for the buildings that exist and just swap out a different image name in the last few lines of the script.
they are in maya\brushes\cityMesh

I used this tutorial on building a tree brush for the second image test, as the basis for building and aligning the trunk is similiar to a building.
tutorial on creating a tree from scratch in maya paint effects

it kind of sucks, you can't import your own meshes, but buildings are mostly square or occasionally cylindrical, and the brush meshes are a form of procedural modeling and instancing, so the speed benefits for something like a previs are considerable.

On an unrelated note
I'm currently in love with zbrush and Silo for modeling
zpheres -> GoZ -> maya/max is cool but mostly I'm just getting used to the nice texturing and sculpting in zbrush instead of being a poly miser which is what silo is for.
And then, theres the *sigh* retopology tools in both...

the building excercise here is total poly miser crap, built for speed not realism.