A big part of our game's environment revolves around the crushing ecosystem of brutalist-styled buildings surrounding us. To avoid having our Level Designers and Environment Artist working overtime polishing pixels, I started looking into different ways we could procedurally make the buildings and slot in our different modular kit pieces in a way that was both: easy and fast.
Reference Images
A sketch detailing the concept of breaking buildings up on a grid system in the three primary axis with different pieces that can be slotted in.
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For this project I ended up looking a lot at SideFX's Project Titan tutorials since they developed a plugin specifically for this purpose. However I found that through all the provided literature/documentation, a step very early on in the process is often overlooked/missed. This is most likely due to an update later without updating the resource content.
Resources:
https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/building-generator/ https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/project-titan-building-tool/ https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/labs--remove_inside_faces.html https://80.lv/articles/learn-how-to-make-procedural-building-generator-in-houdini https://forums.odforce.net/topic/54726-building-generator-from-image-houdini-beginner-tutorial/ https://80.lv/articles/setting-up-playground-generator-in-houdini-unreal-engine
https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/building-generator/ https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/project-titan-building-tool/ https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/labs--remove_inside_faces.html https://80.lv/articles/learn-how-to-make-procedural-building-generator-in-houdini https://forums.odforce.net/topic/54726-building-generator-from-image-houdini-beginner-tutorial/ https://80.lv/articles/setting-up-playground-generator-in-houdini-unreal-engine
Example of SideFX's plugin
The best resource I had on this experiment was the Project Titan tutorial file which allowed me to poke through how each option works. However, the two biggest take-aways from this file was the complex nature of the architecture being generated and the in-engine designs being made.
To align our style with brutalist architecture, the ornate style of the tutorial style is not necessary. Rather we will be focused on specifically blocky architecture, as such the beta version of this tool is primarily focused on singular rectangular architecture, with notes to expand in future iterations
Another aspect was the fact that all of the geometry being entered was focused on geometry being made in Unreal rather than an external program like Maya or Blender, this required 'normalizing' the input files and ensuring, regardless of input and size, that the files work together.
Another aspect was the fact that all of the geometry being entered was focused on geometry being made in Unreal rather than an external program like Maya or Blender, this required 'normalizing' the input files and ensuring, regardless of input and size, that the files work together.
A complex version of the building generator.
The main problem of this complex version is in regards to optimization. The way the primary blockout is made relies on overlapping the two cubes rather than merging them together by the vertex. A big part of this generator is to allow the Level Designers to make buildings that best fit their need. If I have to provide base shapes for them to use, it is more restrictive than necessary. This causes the generator to create wall geometry in the inside faces which is unecessary.
Enjoy some errors
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