mara91 .

Hello, first of all, I have been playing with Houdini for some time now and I find it extremely capable (and fast) for procedural city generation (from footprints) unlike other apps in which I have been working previously..

But I'm having problem to understand (and haven't found solution anywhere) how to do local edits on procedurally generated geometry - for example manually selecting 1 footprint and changing some parameters only for this selection (like building height for extrusion..) or moving its points to change footprint shape...

The use-case would be like this: Houdini procedurally generates a city so that it will do most of the work and then a user will fine-tune details by adjusting few parameters on certain problematic places/buildings and after that the city will be re-generated (which is faster than modifying already-generated 3D models either in houdini or other 3D application)


Here is my simplified setup - I just imported a couple of footprints and then randomly extruded them in foreach loop



Now I want to:

1) select one of these buildings by clicking on it and now somehow edit certain parameters like building_height that will affect only this selected footprint (because if I change it in PolyExtrude node, it will obviously change it for all footprints)


2) next, I would like to do is to change footprint's shape by moving (translating) its points. Well, I managed to that by setting display flag on source footprint and template flag on output (which is extruded footprint in this case) and while this is cumbersome but works - it is extremely slow when running on complex code with lots of buildings because It has to re-generate all buildings with each movement of a point.


Can you please provide solutions for these problems or please explain what are the best-practices with these use-cases?
Thanks

I had a similiar problem. The easiest way is to use .osm instead of shapefiles using osm_import node from Game Development Toolset https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YDWj0-QFVQ&ab_channel=Houdini [www.youtube.com]

and it supports attributes

I know it's not shapefiles but you can convert .shp into .osm using multiple ways (the easiest imo is using GlobalMapper but it's not free) or you can get .osm file of the same area from openstreetmap.org