Was working on this procedural bookshelf for unreal to test the unreal engine, now I decided to make space station library, will try it unreal, not sure if unreal can survive that many instances of books, if it dies might need to redshift it or bake the bookshelves as boxes and not individual books.

*books themselves are megascan assets

Here's the early concepts

Looks cool buddy. Well done. To what extent this is procedural I wonder?

Thanks!

So far just the bookshelf is procedural since I'm testing Houdini engine, so you can control the size of the lower shelf, how many upper shelves, spacing between large, med and small book sizes, size of overall bookshelf ect. Pretty basic things for Houdini users, just a lot of parameters saved out so unreal can read them.

The rest of the structure is just concept art so far, I just speed modeled it in just 1.5 hours or so, I can add procedural when I can, like railings, stairs, things like that, but honestly it doesn't need it much. My purpose is just to do enough to learn how Houdini engine in unreal works.

If I want to challenge myself, I can try a more procedural layout of the structure, or make it look really bizarre like hypercube dimension sort of thing. But not sure if I'll invest too much time into this.

I see, makes sense. Looks great so far. So how is the performance when imported to game engine with Houdini engine?

So far it's great, the build times get higher quick with each bookshelf copied, will find out more once I start copying the book shelves around all over.
I have no idea how the engine instances them or if I'll just break it at some point.
It needs uv's without overlaps for the light bakes which is the more annoying part over just triplaner mapping things.
I'm not the best at uvw in Houdini.

Will keep posted on my update efforts.will find out this week

3dspline
So far it's great, the build times get higher quick with each bookshelf copied, will find out more once I start copying the book shelves around all over.
I have no idea how the engine instances them or if I'll just break it at some point.
It needs uv's without overlaps for the light bakes which is the more annoying part over just triplaner mapping things.
I'm not the best at uvw in Houdini.

Will keep posted on my update efforts.will find out this week

What kind of technique you are using for building the shelves? I found working with Curves is much more effieient!

I used a box for the overall shape and shelf item, curve for the points to scatter books onto.

So far unreal is handling the instances of the books well, just one problem, can't copy more then 1 hda asset at a time, if I select two or more bookshelves and copy them then only 1 will remain an hda asset the others will just be a Houdini logo and never work as an asset. not sure if this is a limitation of the system?

Update on progress:

Maybe there is a limitation if you are using Indie licence, I am not really sure. So far scene looks really promising.

Getting a bit more finished, need to spend some time getting better unreal lighting and still need some kind of support frame for all the pillars.

Not sure why I didn't got the notification for this. Looks good buddy. Inception-like a library!

Thank you!

I finished it up, I'm really not that good at unreal yet, this project was to learn some of the basics! I now just have to wait for Houdini engine to release for unreal 5, that will be fun to play with in the future!

Here's the result I got.
https://youtu.be/F8d9mguc8rw [youtu.be]

The end result looks great, nice work!

End result looks great, you should have created some walking around video.