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Play, download and edit the video Procedural Haussmanian Building generator with Houdini Clarisse.

A Little breakdown of a procedural setup that I did last year at Artfx for my graduation project, Opale ( vimeo.com/371156345 ).

We had a city to make, so we choose to do it in procedural.

The idea was to generate a setup that give me flexibility in the modifications or retakes. I've build it to work like an HDA, with a control panel that drives everything.

This video is made about the fotages and renders that I had from last year, I don't have the licenses and the time to redo images to explain in depth about the system. So I will try to explain it in this description :)

I faced a lot of challenges on this setup, on many point. I have a lot of things to show or explain about how I searched solutions and how I find and apply them.
I learned so much by doing this. I want to share the maximum.

I kept the ground map non procedural, in this way I could draw the city that I wanted, the streets that I wanted, depending on the shots. I simply drew polygons in Maya over a map of Paris. Then, I've send it to Houdini to split the "blocks" to generate buildings footprint and write all the information needed for the generation.

Then, each footprint is computed separately, and generate a building.

I had the chance to go to Paris for an Internship, where I shot a lot of photos to have as much references as possible. I studied the common points and the differences between the buildings. I made a big list and tried to implement as much variations as possible, with a lot a rules.
Generating the variations and keep a setup that works on almost every situations was the longest part, but the funyest too.

Not all the geometry is generated in Houdini, All the "assets" like windows, chemnys, fences, etc... are modeled by hand in Maya and instanciate trough the buildings.

One of my priority was to keep my work as light as possible in term of Data. The geometry has to be exported and I don't wanted to deal with terrabytes of data.

Thats why each building is exported in two files:
- The geometry generated in Houdini
- A point cloud with transform and ID attributes.

In this way, all the external geometries that enters in Houdini (The assets) are reexported as single points.
It's light, and more flexible on retakes.

PDG was not existing at this moment, so I played with the Wedges to made a system to export my geometry with the correct nomenclature.

Then, In Clarisse, I've import all the geometries and point clouds in single contexts, generating a combiner and a scatterer per building. They are linked to the geometry and the point cloud.
Clarisse can read the attributes on the geometry, it's so powerfull, I just have to import all the assets one time, and read the ID and transforms on the point clouds to instanciate them on their right place.

For the shading, I know since the beginning that I will use tilable maps, so
I took the time to generate proper UVs, based on procedural rules, not automatic. And all fit with the same UV texel density, with a ratio between the area in the UV space and in the 3D space.

To build my shaders, I used the attributes on the geometry to generate variations, texture switchs, etc.

Then, I finaly could import them in a scene and do the shots very quickly.
I tried to push the limit of it, for example, on the first shot of this video, there is more than 4000 unique models, because why not, the data is so light.

When all of this was finished, it was a satisfaction, but also a frustration, I wanted to push it more and more and dind't want to believe that it was over.

I hope you have found this interesting, if you want to know more about it, don't hesitate to send me a message.

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Contact :
linkedin.com/in/vincent-leclerc/
[email protected]

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