Procedural Buildings - Creating a Modular Grid

One of my favorite systems to make in Houdini Engine, is a building construction system. I have built quite a few of them with varying levels of success over the years. Now you might be saying to your self, "Kenny, there's a ton of tutorials on how to make Buildings in Houdini!". Sure there are! There is even the Side FX Labs Building Node that was recently released that helps us put together buildings in a modular way. And I'm sure with some amount of work you could get it to work nicely in the Houdini Engine for Unity or Unreal.

My Goal here is to document and demonstrate the various techniques I have collected over the years and show you guys how you can make your own custom Building Generators for your own projects. So I have started a series, available to the Indie-Pixel Patrons, on just that.

In this first video we talk about how to allow a level designer to layout out volumes and shapes to define the overall shape of the Building. I find this to be a bit more flexible when working with a Level design team. Rather than have a Level Designer to take the time to build out the whole low poly Building shape, then feed that into the HDA, lets make a set of shapes we combine together to make buildings.

Once we get through the shape definition, we walk through the process of creating the modular grid that is necessary for modular parts to be placed. I step through all the VEX necessary to create the Grid, define the floor number, find the corners, and much more! So I wanted to start to write about the progress of the series so those who are not on the Indie-Pixel Patreon page, can see how things are coming along!

If you want to watch the videos and join in the fun! Join the Indie-Pixel Patreon Page today! :-)

Thanks so much!

Kenny

Indie-Pixel