PROCEDURAL LAKE HOUSES VOLUME 1

In these tutorial series, we will be creating procedural lake houses in Houdini all the way from generating the main silhouette to creating the final shaders and placing setdressing. We will implement a set of rules that is flexible enough to support complex silhouettes and relations as well as we will cover the usage of both pre-made modules and procedurally generated content. By the end of the series, you will be able to create the base silhouette, define relationships between various elements, procedurally place modules, generate additional geometry to give the building a finished look and create all the needed shaders that will be driven by the system. I will walk you through all the core concepts that are used to make this possible, which will give you a good foundation that you can apply in any other project. All the assets and files you will need for this tutorial will be included together with the course material. I will expect of you to have a good knowledge of Houdini user interface as well as some basic knowledge of VEX. If you never used VEX before, make sure to check the official documentation on VEX before starting.

In the first chapter, we will focus on setting up the main silhouette and base attributes, which will be the core for driving all the following aspects of our procedural building. We will determine the rules for both the body and the roof and define the relationships between those elements.

Part 1 – Base Silhouette

In Part 1 we will create a network that generates the base for the building’s silhouette by writing simple rules that determine the positioning of the box geometry relative to each other.

Part 2 – Self-intersection & Offset Modularity

In Part 2 we will deal with self-intersection of the stacked geometry we created in Part 1 as well as we will break the modularity of our silhouette by adding extra rules.

Part 3 A-B – Roof Division & Roof Direction

In Part 3 we will start creating our roof system by using the base silhouette we created earlier. To achieve a “stepped roofs” look, we will break the roof into a procedural pattern, where elements are assigned roof directions relative to its neighbours.

Part 4 A-B – Roof Height Levels & Roof Elevations

In Part 4 we will define the roof height levels taking into consideration the heights of its neighbours as well as adding additional platforms to account for drastic elevation differences.

Part 5 – Roof Extrusion

In Part 5 we will perform the final extrusion and merging between the neighbouring roofs and we will also take care of exception cases such as when two neighbour roofs are of the same direction. 

Hello! My name is Anastasia Opara. Growing up in artists’ family, I naturally developed a very strong interest in contemporary arts. By the age of 16, I have taken part in exhibitions (digital photography, drawings, short movies, poetry) in Russia, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Belgium, and Hungary; I was a participant of the annual international exhibition of contemporary art "OSRTALE’10" in Dresden, the I Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, and had my personal exhibition in the A3 Gallery in the center of Moscow. My unquenchable passion for arts led me to explore the field of 3D computer graphics, and in 2013 I joined NHTV International Game Architecture and Design in Netherlands with a speciality of 3D Visual Arts. During my education, the biggest revelation was the Introduction to Procedural Modelling course by Kim Goossens. The procedural approach completely blew me away. It seemed like mesmerising magic of art and programming, and my immediate reaction was “I want to be a wizard too!” Proceduralism became my absolute passion. Seeing things as a set of rules and patterns fascinates me, and every task becomes an absorbing puzzle when rendered through such a workflow. Currently, I’m a Technical Artist Intern at EA Ghost Games.