Another city generator? Yes :)
For this weeks blog I decided to start making a city builder tool. I'm looking for a tool that is easy to use and can create easily cities. The process of making this will take a few blogs. So as this is the first post about it, it will be more research and experimental ideas on the tool.
I also want to share this video of Indie pixel were he breaks down how to start with Houdini, so if you are new to Houdini or know someone new to it, the video gives a good overview what it will take to learn basics of Houdini.
Further in the week I have published a new art work on Artstation. In blog 24 I made the base of it.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8la5ww
Base ground
To create the buildings I want a system were you can click or paint the building. For inspiration I really like this: https://twitter.com/i/status/1164926304640229376 made by Oskar Stålberg
As base for test I made a simple setup were you can paint buildings.
To create something similar start with a grid or other shape you like. Then use a Voronoi fracture to create a layout for the city (see image below). Based on how you handle the fracture it will create the shape you are looking for, more can be found about fracturing in blog 10.
Once you got that use the paint SOP to color where you want the buildings. Don't forget to put a color with black (value 0,0,0) before painting.
With the Poly extrude you can then get buildings out of it. In the Poly extrude you got to Local control and use Cd in the Distance Scale. Notice that the Cd attribute has to be stored in the primitives, you can use a attribute promote to change the Cd from points to primitive attributes.
You should have something similar like the image above, what I also did in that image is snapping along the Y axis, so I control how long each floor is. You can snap the points by using a fuse sop with snap to grid or you can use a wrangle and use the rint function.
This is the simple base setup for the city, I might change it later. For early testing this will be fine.
Generate Buildings
For the buildings I choose to go more in a direction of Sci-fi. I have made a house generator before (see it here) but this time I want to experiment a bit more and see with what interesting systems I find.
To create the big main shapes of the building I used copy stamp SOP. In this video you can get a good idea on how it works and how you can set it up.
What I found that cutting that generated shape in half, can be useful as base for a building.
The order that I want create the building is first big shape then medium shape and then small shapes. (this is similar like the general approach of creating a model, start with big shape and go to more smaller shapes)
For the medium shapes in this case I took some medium houses and copy them on the generated base. I didn't use the scatter node to place them around, I felt with the scatter it was a bit to random. So points are placed based on a grid, so buildings would less overlap.
The Copy Stamp was also used to create the houses to get a different size.
What I also want to show you is that in the Game Dev Tools is a cable generator. By simply drawing a curve it generates multiple cable. Based on what you are looking for, it can be useful. If you would be looking for something more complex like let's say you need a cable that reacts with collisions then you need a custom system or you could tweak the Game Dev tool.
This week was a bit more experimenting and trying out different systems. Next week I will continue trying out more systems and finding what I'm looking for.