Hello everyone!

For a school project (BUAS) I am trying to create a custom building generator.
I've been trying to wrap my head around the Labs building generator's aproach to this problem and how I would be able to apply it to my own project. With about 2 months of experience in Houdini, I hope to be able to learn many new nodes and get a better insight into the creation of procedural generation systems.

My main goal is to be able to generate Machiya Townhouses using a HDA in Unreal Engine, by using an Unreal Cube as input.
Some Features that I want to add are:

1. Custom 2m*2m wall inputs
   
2. Custom Material inputs
   
3. Door placement based on a secondary input
   
4. Multiple roof patterns
   
5. Preset Wall modules
   

Below I will show my current progress!

I have a basic graph that allows me to place multiple floors that all fit according to the input geometry

The next steps I am planning to undertake are adding ID's to the different floors within the for-each loop so that I can give different floors different pieces, and making a start on the roof system based on the project Titan Tutorial


I am still very new to Houdini and would appreciate any feedback/insights in how to improve my work!
I will be updating this post with updates during the upcoming weeks.

Progress report 17/09/2024

Hello everyone!

One of my teachers advised me to test out the generator in Unreal Engine as soon as possible.
Following his instructions, I found a bug that occurs when the bounding box is too small.
Another member of the teaching staff gave me the idea to force the input to always be at least 2 wall-modules in width to ensure you cannot mess up. the system is now working as expected



While I was working, I added a basic roof that uses the width of the building to determine the height of the roof. I will most likely change this after I do some more research on the topic, but this system seems to be working right now. to ensure that the sides of the roof are closed off, I added a wrangle that gives me the floor level of the last added point (the highest) and makes them a separate group. I create the building as normal and place the roof on the second highest floor, which then proceeds to Boolean and create its own side walls. To ensure that this doesn’t happen to the first floor I added an exception to the selection of the ground floor and made sure the bounding box cannot be smaller than 2 wall-modules in height.


My next goal is to test the generator out with real geometry and find a way to add a door to the building.

You referenced the Titan project. Are you following this pipeline or creating your own tool?

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/project-titan-building-tool/ [www.sidefx.com]



This might be some inspiration as well:

I am building my own tool, inspired by the methodology of the project Titan building tool. Instead of relying on using the labs building generators, it is my goal to build everything myself as a way to gain more experience with custom tools and Houdini in general.

I'll be taking a look at the video you shared and see if any of it is applicable to my project, thank you very much for sharing!

Really cool! This walkthrough article might also be insightful and topical for your project subject domain: https://80.lv/articles/learn-how-to-make-procedural-building-generator-in-houdini/ [80.lv]