Hi, Wondering if anyone has run into any confusion using the new-ish building from patterns node.
I was able to follow some basic tutorials and it works as expected, but one thing that has me scratching my head is the "cutout" and "override floor" inputs. I'm able to use the cutout input to blast away parts of my initial floor pattern and it seems like you are supposed to be able to replace the void made w/ the cutout geometry with a different grammar or "Pattern" by connecting another "floor" definition to the fourth input, but It is a bit of a mystery as that does not work out of the box.

Is this the intended functionality? if so is there any example workflow available of it being used?
Thanks in advance.

Hey! I'm playing with Building From Patterns and I'm struggling to get it working, I followed tutorials from Simon with older houdini versions (19.0) but when I updated the sidefx labs version something broke. Now I'm trying from scratch in 19.5 but even the simplest setup gives me error...do you manage to get a simple building out of it? which houdini and labs versions are you using?
cheers!

Yes, I can tell you I had a little bit of trouble when I first started working with it and thought it was buggy or broken, but I was just making simple mistakes. I'm using 19.5.435 and a fairly recent daily build of labs, not sure which one.
make sure your blockout shape is a closed shape, and that it is a multiple of the height you have defined in your floor description. Also verify that your expanded floor has at least one module in between these greater/less than brackets "<>" or else the system will not know to repeat your module around the blockout shape. I think the cook will fail if say you had the floor grammar defined as
"" rather than "<A>" if that makes sense?

hope that helps!

I've been exploring the capabilities of this tool and am wondering if the floor patterns can be varied from face to face or only level to level?

I'd like to place blank walls on the north/south faces and windows on the east/west faces.

For example if we have a block of buildings in the traditional city style, very close to eachother side by side, could be do something within the pattern to vary the features on certain sides so that only a blank wall is placed. Hoping that there's a solution on the node before I go get out the attribute wrangle.

And a related question: Is there any additional docs besides this?

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/labs--building_from_patterns-1.0.html [www.sidefx.com]

I'm just curious about the syntax, as of now the only information about it I can find is in the project titan demo videos, would be nice to have even a short paragraph or list of ways to write patterns.

mliuzzi0
I've been exploring the capabilities of this tool and am wondering if the floor patterns can be varied from face to face or only level to level?

I'd like to place blank walls on the north/south faces and windows on the east/west faces.

(...)

I'm running into similar issues. There's that variation parameter in the floor description tab of the utility node but I have no idea how to use it. Documentation is non-existent.

Starting to think Labs HDAs should enforce tooltipping on parameters for approval at very least.