I am new to the Houdini Forums - im primarily a 3dsmax user. However, our company is looking at streamlining some processes, and so i though Houdini.
What we are looking for, is editability with 3d cities / masterplan sites. Currently, we have other team members researching into CityScape (PixelActive) and CityEngine (Procedural Inc.)
I am wondering, can Houdini procedurally and parametrically create cities? Like for example, if i import a DWG or even an image, can i start modelling my terrain and roads, plant houses and all my landscaping; and if the client decides to re-topologise or redesign all the roads, can i adjust the terrain/roads in houdini, and the rest will follow?
I was looking at the CMIVFX videos, but i dont really want to buy them just to answer 1 question.
Does any one know whether we can achieve this in Houdini, and if so, is there any documentation or tutorials that anyone can share.
Houdini can definitely do this. However, it won't be a “bring in dwg and city will appear” type thing
Basically, Houdini is a procedural toolkit. The tutorials on CMIVFX like the procedural cities XML, the original Procedural Cities (made for Houdini 8 but still very relevant) and the Road Builder tutorials show you how to leverage Houdini's operators to build these things.
However, how you build it, and the foresight you put into it, will directly impact how well a base change like a map will travel downstream.
I can't comment on those plugins/programs you mention, but I bet they will more quickly give you a city than Houdini will. I will also bet that Houdini will ultimately give you maximum flexibility and true proceduralism in the long run….
Thanks for the reply! Yeah im not after the whole short-cuts and build-with-one-click, just more edit-ability.
Ultimately, we're after a package (like Houdini) that will offer procedural/parametric editing abilities. At the moment, if we complete a large mastersite or city, and our client presents us with a new DWG or new terrain data, we have to: 1. Recreate/edit the site 2. Edit the roads, gutters, street lights, signs etc 3. place buildings.. etc etc…. :shock:
So we basically have to go through the entire process. This has happened countless times. We do bill for it, but it's just an insane work-flow, having to redo everything over and over again.
With the way Houdini can create digital assets, i was thinking that if we spent a considerable amount of time creating these editable assets, then we can re-use them over and over again (Especially if they're projects from the same client were there are lots of similarities).
I might have to look more into this. We are really keen to change our pipe-line for maximum productivity and efficiency regarding changes as mention.
It does sound like Houdini would be a good match for your needs. Most of us Houdini types are pretty lazy (in a good way) and don't want to redo work when a procedural approach would take care of it.
Like you say, there is a front-end cost to building everything up but once you grok Houdini's geometry building abilities (i.e. the proceduralism) you'll be thinking 10 steps ahead
I tried to compete with an architectural competition a few weeks ago but got stuck on creating the landscape…so sat down and wrote myself a crude terrain generator. Of course didn't make the deadline to submit my project but next time I have the terrain up in 10 minutes and then I have a lot more time to concentrate on the actual architectural model.
Anyway, here is a little setup of how to create a surface from a map with height lines from a cad file. This can of course be extended anyway you want (tie roads, roadsigns etc to the terrain model etc, etc…)
Thanks for that Pagefan, that really help. I just need to break it down a bit and try understand it all. Comeing from a 3damax perspective, it all looks so complex!
Ill let you know whether or not we decide to change our pipeline, but it looks like a few people are convinced by it. It's just the steep learning-curve i guess, but as Peter said, we'll be ahead once we sort all that out.
If you have questions or anything about the file you can pm me.
Good luck with the rest of the evaluation process. BTW, there are quite a few skilled Houdini artists in Australia. You could always hire them (temporarily) to help you set up your pipeline and give you a heads up in learning Houdini.
Sorry for not answering sooner, but I have been completely focused on the release of buildingEngine and finishing a few other modules. BTW, Simon, thanks for pointing the link! -) -)
With respect to your original question, I know the tools you mention, and I can tell you none of them beat Houdini in flexibility. Of course, as pbowmar mentioned, they are specialized products for that specific task, so you might get to an initial solution in a shorter time. However, in our case, as we are a university research group, we needed flexibility above it all, and none of the existing products were able to deliver that amount of flexibility. With Houdini we are not limited to the tools provided by the developers, but we are continuously creating our own stuff (procedural bridges, Ancient East buildings like Pagodas, street networks by example, 4D time-dependent cities, etc). This flexibility allows us not only to seamlessly incorporate any research paper we find interesting, but to explore new ways and create new stuff to address old and new problems.
To give you a small example, up to now, the only way to generate buildings was to use a text-based paradigm, that was, in my humble point of view, very uncomfortable. One of our first research results was adapting this to the node-based workflow Houdini provides, solving several problems at once. The result of that research is the new version of buildingEngine we've just made (and a paper that we'll probably post as a tech report until it's published).
One module we are currently developing is an OpenStreetMap loader, but it won't be ready until a few more months. Anyway, I think it shouldn't be too difficult to convert your DWG to something we could process with skylineEngine. We should think about it…
