What's BAD?

The 'Building Automatic Detail Tools' (BAD_tools for short) is a project I started one month ago to help artists model and prepare geometry for RBDs. The idea is to create a suite of HDAs to convert any simple geometry into a hi-res RBD-ready geo.
Here is an example:



** Those images represent the idea of what I want to achieve. This is partly made with BAD_tools and partly hand-modelled.
** The base house model was done by HQ3DMOD

For who?

I want the BAD_tools suite to be useful for a wide range of artists. From students who need to have good geometry for their projects or demo reels, freelance 3D artists, or little studios that don't have many resources to buy or hire a 3D modeler, or even to speed up the workflow of a big company or a 3D modeler itself.

My contest submision

In this year's Tech Art Challenge, I want to introduce to you the first HDA of this project; the ✨BAD_walls✨.

The BAD_walls tool allows you to convert your input geometry into a wall made of bricks, stones, tiles, or you can even use your geometry to create the wall.

Here's a quick real-time video without any cuts, showcasing the power of this tool. From a cube to a high-end RBD ready house in 2:30 minutes:




BAD_walls progress

I have some kind of "finished setup", but I would need to prepare the HDA UI, and do some testing before considering the tool finished.

Those are the remarkable settings:

• It has 5 different cutting modes: Orthographic, Cylindrical, Input Floor Plan, Input Points, and Input Pieces. Depending on the shape of your input geometry and the result you want to achieve, you may choose one or another. Those modes are easy to work with, and they are the base skeleton of the setup.
  
  
  
  
  
• It has a whole tab dedicated to delete. You can clean the floors/ceiling of the input geometry based on an Angle Threshold, and you can also delete bricks based on a randomness, or a given order. You can also delete small pieces that are causing problems.
  
  
  
  
  
• There's a pretty big tab dedicated to giving detail to the bricks. You can add Beveling, Damage, and Worn as needed. Combining different BAD_walls, you can create really interesting patterns.
  
  
  
  
• The last functionality I added to the tool is the ability to Wobble the walls, maintaining the position of the unshared edges. In this tab, you can decide if you want to only move the bricks or deform them.
  
  
  
  
• The cement you can see in the example photos is also part of the tool, and you can control the thickness of the cement, spacing between the cement and the bricks, smoothness, and much more.
  

Roadmap

• FIX some known errors
  
• Creating the tool UI and modifying the setup accordingly
  
• Start designing the BAD_tools iconography
  
• Testing, sending the tool and debugging
  
• Create the Help page
  
• Create Help video resources
  
• Create small tips & tricks type video resources
  

The future of BAD_tools

I think that this project can be an amazing time-saver tool, especially for VFX Students who want to practice or showcase their RBD sims and don't have much knowledge of procedural modeling or don't want to spend money buying a high-end model for a personal project. Creating this type of detail with custom models can be frustrating and time-consuming so I believe that it would be amazing to be part of next year's SideFX Labs or the Content Library.


If you have any questions about it, or you want to contact me for any reason don't hesitate to send me a DM on Linkedin (link in my profile).

Thanks for all and I hope you like the tool

BAD_walls Update v1.02

It's been a while since the first post, but I think that I have enough changes to create a decent update


New implementations:

• I created all the UI trying to be as simple and intuitive as possible. I changed the setup accordingly to the new functions and switches. The UI responds and modifies based on the options selected.
  
  
• A color functionality is now part of the UI as well. It can be used to create B/W masks or color variations for shading purposes.
  
  
• I created a new parameter where you can decide the name of the output geometry groups, so it's easier to work with more than one BAD_walls.
  

Bugs And Fixes:

• There are some changes on the 'Delete' tab. A new button is added where you can fix flickering issues and improve the performance significantly when you want to animate the parameters. The first method is better when having a lot of bricks and you don't need to animate any parameter on the 'Delete' tab. The second method is slower at the start but lets you animate without flickering and with a better performance.
  
  
• The Input pieces mode was not functioning properly, now a 'Piece Attribute' parameter is added where you can control how the input geometry is scattered.
  
  
• All the setup is properly tidied up with annotations for all those curious people.
  

Here's a video showing all the progress: