Layout Generator Updates

This week I made a lot of improvements to the Layout Generator.

• It now takes user defined curve inputs for the main roads, and the grid is divided based on those inputs.
• The user can also draw using a curve the ‘city area,’ allowing for more interesting city shapes.
• The tool will also scan each of the divided pieces and remove pieces that are considered too small to spawn buildings on from the list of pieces that will go into the loop that spawns the building footprints. Those pieces are added to a separate group and can later be added back as road verges.

Building Footprint Generator

I created the Building Footprint Generator. This is going to be the tool that the Layout Generator will work with to spawn the building footprints/blockouts.

The tool can generate building footprints based on 8 categories:

• Basic
• L
• H
• O
• Z
• C
• X
• E

It starts by just generating the footprints (No height), The plan is for the layout tool to start by placing those shapes in viable locations, using variations in the dimensions.

Then the layout tool will add a random number of stories from the acceptable range. (4-16)

Building Generator

I also started playing around with the Building Generator in combination with the Footprint Generator.

I created placeholder walls in Houdini with the same dimensions as my Maya blockouts to see how the buildings would potentially generate with the modular assets.

Houdini has a “Building_From_Patterns” node; it works by basically defining different wall modules and floor patterns based on user defined patterns (Ex: Place Wall A, then Wall B twice then Wall A again...etc.). It works great with minimal work, except one thing, the corners overlap in some areas, and in others there is a gap. 

I spent quite a bit of time trying to find a solution, but I haven't had much luck (This seems to be a common thing that happens with this node, but there aren't any good solutions available that I could find). I will continue to try and find a solution, but I am starting to consider building a custom building generator. Which one hand would be very cool and help me a lot in learning more about Houdini, but it would also be incredibly time consuming.

But I spent a lot of time trying to find a solution and trying to decipher the Houdini node, and after crashing Houdini many times I decided to take a break and then I made concrete.