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In this tutorial series we will be creating procedural lake houses in Houdini all the way from generating the main silhouette to creating the final shaders and placing set dressings. We will implement a set of rules that are flexible enough to support complex silhouettes and relations as well cover the usage of both pre-made modules and procedurally generated content. By the end of the series you will be able to create the base silhouette, define relationships between various elements, procedurally place modules, generate additional geometry to give the building a finished look and create all the needed shaders that will be driven by the system. I will walk you through all the core concepts that are used to make this possible, which will give you a good foundation that you can apply in any other project. All the assets and files you will need for this tutorial will be included together with the course material. I will expect you to have a good knowledge of Houdini’s user interface as well as some basic knowledge of VEX. If you have never used VEX before, make sure to check the official documentation on VEX before starting.
In the first volume we will focus on setting up the main silhouette and base attributes, which will be the core for driving all the following aspects of our procedural building. We will determine the rules for both the body and the roof and define the relationships between those elements.
In Part 1 we will create a network that generates the base for the building’s silhouette by writing simple rules that determine the positioning of the box geometry relative to each other.
Part 2 – Self-intersection & Offset Modularity
In Part 2 we will deal with self-intersection of the stacked geometry we created in Part 1 as well as we will break the modularity of our silhouette by adding extra rules.
In Part 3 we will start creating our roof system by using the base silhouette we created earlier. To achieve a “stepped roofs” look, we will break the roof into a procedural pattern, where elements are assigned roof directions relative to its neighbors.
In Part 4 we will define the roof height levels taking into consideration the heights of its neighbors as well as adding additional platforms to account for drastic elevation differences.
In Part 5 we will perform the final extrusion and merging between the neighboring roofs and we will also take care of exception cases such as when two neighbor roofs are of the same direction.
Once you've finished this volume, continue with volume 2.
Anastasia Opara grew up in an artists’ family and naturally developed a very strong interest in contemporary arts. By the age of 16, she had taken part in exhibitions (digital photography, drawings, short movies, poetry) in Russia, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Belgium, and Hungary. She was a participant of the annual international exhibition of contemporary art "OSRTALE’10" in Dresden, the Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, and had her personal exhibition in the A3 Gallery in the center of Moscow. Anastasia’s unquenchable passion for arts led her to explore the field of 3D computer graphics, and in 2013 she joined NHTV International Game Architecture and Design in Netherlands with a specialty in 3D Visual Arts. During her education, the biggest revelation was the Introduction to Procedural Modeling course by Kim Goossens. “The procedural approach completely blew me away. It seemed like mesmerizing magic of art and programming, and my immediate reaction was “I want to be a wizard too!” Proceduralism became my absolute passion. Seeing things as a set of rules and patterns fascinates me, and every task becomes an absorbing puzzle when rendered through such a workflow.” Anastasia is a Technical Artist Intern at EA Ghost Games.
Personal website – www.anastasiaopara.com
Anastasia Opara grew up in an artists’ family and naturally developed a very strong interest in contemporary arts. By the age of 16, she had taken part in exhibitions (digital photography, drawings, short movies, poetry) in Russia, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Belgium, and Hungary. She was a participant of the annual international exhibition of contemporary art "OSRTALE’10" in Dresden, the Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, and had her personal exhibition in the A3 Gallery in the center of Moscow. Anastasia’s unquenchable passion for arts led her to explore the field of 3D computer graphics, and in 2013 she joined NHTV International Game Architecture and Design in Netherlands with a specialty in 3D Visual Arts. During her education, the biggest revelation was the Introduction to Procedural Modeling course by Kim Goossens. “The procedural approach completely blew me away. It seemed like mesmerizing magic of art and programming, and my immediate reaction was “I want to be a wizard too!” Proceduralism became my absolute passion. Seeing things as a set of rules and patterns fascinates me, and every task becomes an absorbing puzzle when rendered through such a workflow.” Anastasia is a Technical Artist Intern at EA Ghost Games.