PROCEDURAL BUILDINGS

PROCEDURAL BUILDINGS

SQUARE ENIX WORK PLACEMENT

FEIKE POSTMES

Quick disclaimer: this is not a new IP of Square Enix. This was a tech-demo showing of the strength of proceduralism using Houdini.

How does it work?

1. The first input takes pieces made by the artist. The system does not require specific sizes, so they can be as large or small as you might want!

Basic shapes as input

2. Basic shapes. Grab some cubes and place them in the scene. Then assign them to the tool. The Final shape is important, you can also cut out pieces using negative shapes.

Houdini takes over

3. Poof!

This is also where materials can be adjusted/swapped. Usual bake time is a few seconds. Main part of the waiting is because of the meshes which need to be imported from Houdini engine to Unreal.

The tool in action

Using a procedural workflow has a lot of advantages. Here you can see me playing with the tool and create a structure within a few minutes. The goal of this tool is to let your artist be as creative as possible without spending any time on tedious tasks like UV-ing walls, snapping objects in the right place etc.

Stress test

This is were some of the true power of the tool is tested. In my opinion if you want to create a tool which has to work perfectly for medium buildings, it also has to work decently for very large structures.

Stress test: 50 shapes, over 2000 pieces generated, 15 seconds to bake.

A few variations!

Special thanks to Adelle Bueno for supervision over the project, Sietske Wielsma for the amazing artwork used in the examples and Zoran Arizanovic for guidance on the topics, and to all others involved for their help and achievements!

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