This is a breakdown of a project I completed some time ago.

A fully procedural city generator and traffic system created in Houdini.

I began by designing a NYC-inspired procedural building generator as a digital asset, capable of producing an almost infinite variety of buildings.

Next, I developed a procedural traffic system with traffic control. The cars in the simulation are controlled by VEX code within a POP network. They follow multiple rules to avoid collisions and adhere to traffic lights. I used curves to define roads and ran an algorithm to assign directions to each road, ensuring the traffic flowed logically throughout the simulation. Each road was given a unique name, and every car had a string attribute representing the name of the road it was currently on. This attribute updated whenever the car turned onto a new road. This portion of the project was inspired by the exceptional work of Franco Pizzani.

Finally, I combined all these elements using instancing to procedurally place street assets. I generated the buildings in a for-each loop, utilizing the digital asset I created earlier.

Hope you like it!