Hello everyone,

I've been interested more and more by the procedural modelling capability in Houdini and have just started experimenting having spent a fair bit of time in Blender. In the last few weeks I've been working on developing a spaceship generator - see images below. There of course isn't really a brief, this is just me experimenting to see if I can come up with a versatile spaceship generator which produces mostly good effects by changing a seed value.

At the moment, the general process has been:

1. Create a basic randomly extruded object.
   
2. Slice the objects up along edge loops and extrude the sections at different random heights.
   
3. Slice the result further following the same process, but this time to a far greater amount to get the ‘greeble’ affect.
   
4. Add some further details using the same extrusion method.
   
5. Use Shortest paths to create some tube effects.
   

Here are some results so far by controlling the effect by a random integer seed value. I used Arnold to texture and render:






What I'm really interested in is where I can improve. I'm particularly drawn to the work of people like Akira Saito. I've experimented with things like Voronoi fracturing, but wanted to come up with a different look.

I'd really appreciate:

• Any lighting/texturing tips. Are there other renders out there such as Redshift that might produce more impressive results for this sort of model?
  
• Effects in Houdini that might be worth considering, e.g. I am yet to experiment with L-Trees etc.
  
• Pointers to tutorials that might help me improve.
  
• General feedback on the look and feel of the images.
  

Many thanks!

Mark

Attachments:
shipwright_houd_test4.jpg (1.5 MB)
shipwright_houd_test3.jpg (1.5 MB)
shipwright_houd_test2.jpg (1.5 MB)
shipwright_houd_test1.jpg (766.0 KB)

@bobc4d - In Arnold (and hopefully this is similar in other setups), I used a combination of cell noise and checker textures to get the effect, restricted to only polygons I had grouped as windows (randomly selected from polygons along a certain axis). The cell noise, set to a non random cell1 pattern, was used to mask the ‘rows’ of windows, and then the checkerboard texture was used to create the actual windows. I then fed another checkerboard texture into one of the colors with different size parameters to make the checkerboard appear random.

Here is a screenshot of the setup, hope this is clear but let me know if you have any questions:



For the pattern on the hull, I also used the checkerboard but also fed in cell noise nodes of different sizes into the offset of the main checkerboard to give a random plating effect. I also fed in other checkerboard nodes to add even more randomness. Here is a screenshot of the nodes:



I would have used cell noise exclusively, but the bump node does not appear to work with this node in Arnold. Checkerboard did.

Hope that helps!

Mark

Attachments:
windows_houdini_nodes.jpg (100.9 KB)
hull_houdini_nodes.jpg (95.8 KB)

I followed the suggestions by Midphase and have this render so far:



I added some noise to get the dirt and lights to the tips.

Critique and suggestions welcome!

Attachments:
shipwright_h_test60.jpg (2.1 MB)

Latest progress:
- Changed seed value, it takes 2-3 seconds to recalculate.
- Improved the distribution of the plates by ordering the slicing operation by the largest faces first.
- Improved the piping effect around the ship (A combination of Find Shortest Paths on random points and a Wireframe SOP)

Attachments:
shipwright_h_test63.jpg (2.3 MB)

Thanks Midphase: I've been experimenting with adding extra details and came across Octane and JSPlacement with some interesting results:








I think I could control the windows more through assigning groups based on distance from the center, yet to figure out how to get the groups into Octane though.

I also did some further experiments with Voronoi displacement:



I have also put the Digital Asset I made to create the basic random 3D shapes on Gumroad and Orbolt:

https://www.orbolt.com/asset/mkingsnorth::shape_generator

https://gumroad.com/l/zmuYY [gumroad.com]




Mark


Further comments welcome!

Attachments:
hd_shipwright_4.jpg (2.3 MB)
hd_shipwright_3.jpg (2.5 MB)
hd_shipwright_2.jpg (2.4 MB)
hd_shipwright_2_bts.jpg (1.4 MB)
hd_shipwright_1.jpg (2.7 MB)
hd_shipwright_4_bts.jpg (1.3 MB)
vermilion1-1.jpg (1.6 MB)
twisted_extrude_splash4.jpg (937.0 KB)

Here's some work from today: I grouped and assigned a different whiter jsplacement material to the top and bottom faces of the geometry to get a nicer effect:

Attachments:
hd_shipwright_5.jpg (1.2 MB)