Q2 W1
01.05.26 - 01.18.26
Completed
- Procedural building with art directable parameters
- UV-projection based city layout tests
To Do
- Begin replacing assets in previz scenes to start setting up shots
Procedural Buildings
Over the holidays, I wanted to build a tool to procedurally generate buildings in a much more controlled or art directable fashion. I also wanted to have control over the shape and offer myself flexibility in the future to quickly create these structures with complexity and variation.
The process is based on a collection of planes which can be mostly any shape, both with acute and obtuse angles for instances with sharp/rounded corners. Parameters in a single control node can be adjusted to change the appearance of the building in many ways. Density of windows, dimensions of the overall structure, dimensions of smaller details like windows or a/c units, etc.​
Layout Test
To create a crowded collection of buildings, I opted to explore using a UV layout based workflow. In this test, I use an input 'ground plane' and layout each building's ground floor within the plane. I then use an unlocked matchsize node, extracting the scale and transform for the original floor to be placed in the UV layout. These transformations are applied to the buildings one by one; this process is slow, but much faster compared to manual placement.
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Using copy to points is an option, however does not take complex shapes into account. To prevent intersecting buildings the points would simply need to be further apart from each other, therefore using UV layout can keep them close together.