Procedural Lake Village

https://www.anastasiaopara.com/lakevillage

by memexy • 6 years ago

152 38 6 years ago

_bxg14• 6 years ago

Houdini is an incredibly cool tool: https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/

One of the things I most dislike about tools like Blender is that it can be really hard to go back to earlier stages of the process and make adjustments. Most changes are destructive, even though they don't really need to be. I follow lots of digital artists on Twitter and some of them use Houdini, and the kind of stuff they can generate is just mindblowing.

I'd try it out myself if it weren't for the price; I've always been drawn to procedural creation as a bridge between what a person imagines and what they can get a computer to render.

iamcreasy• 6 years ago

One of the things I most dislike about tools like Blender is that it can be really hard to go back to earlier stages of the process and make adjustments.

I do not think it is a big drawback of Blender since other tools such as Maya and 3ds Max are also destructive.

_bxg14• 6 years ago

By "tools like Blender" I meant the entire category.

memexy5• 6 years ago

Is the price really the blocker? How much does it cost? I looked at the indie edition and it seemed affordable. They also have a free edition: https://www.sidefx.com/buy/#houdini-free.

_bxg14• 6 years ago

Affordable, but a little hard to justify as a casual user who just wants to mess around and doesn't really plan on building anything complete

ur-whale4• 6 years ago

It's not the price that's the problem. It's that it is closed source, and therefore any work you produce is on a guaranteed path to bitrot.

hartror• 6 years ago

Links to artists you recommend?

emllnd3• 6 years ago

Some names + Twitter handles: Ben Watts (http://twitter.com/benwattsdesign), Simon Holmedal (http://twitter.com/Sholmedal), Serjan Burlak (http://twitter.com/biogenicdesign), Rohan Dalvi (http://twitter.com/RohanCreates), Tim van Helsdingen (http://twitter.com/TvanHelsdingen)

_bxg14• 6 years ago

Here's a pretty awesome one: https://twitter.com/qornflex/status/1195701316418490368

emllnd3• 6 years ago

For messing around, Apprentice version is free and can do pretty much anything the full version (FX) can, except render in insane resolution. Also, Indie version is cheap (~$200/year).

ur-whale4• 6 years ago

I agree, the lack of parametric modeling is one of the most frustrating thing about blender (that and the super weird multi-object select/deselect workflow)

The modifier stack is, to a limited extent, a flaccid ersatz for full-blown parametric, but it's light-years away from what Houdini can do.

ygra• 6 years ago

Someone in a recent discussion about randomly-generated spaceships in Blender linked this: https://github.com/aachman98/Sorcar

Not terribly familiar with how things work in Houdini (and only dabbling in Blender a few times), but that's been compared to it.

memexy5• 6 years ago

That looks pretty cool.

dorkwood• 6 years ago

Some people do completely non-destructive modelling in Blender using its modifier stack. You can see an example of that here: https://youtu.be/Atw16f8wZ6Y

I'm also a big fan of Houdini, though, and would recommend the free edition to anyone wanting to learn. It's the most fully featured piece of free software I've ever used. I almost can't believe that it's free, it's so good!

thdrdt2• 6 years ago

I think Houdini is a different kind of beast.

You have software like 3ds Max, Maya, C4D, Blender and others. And then you have Houdini.

But you can use Blender more procedural with the modifier stack. And there are great add-ons like Boxcutter: https://blendermarket.com/products/hard-ops--boxcutter-ultim...

GuiA• 6 years ago

Title needs [2016]

cafxx• 6 years ago

Impressive demo, although...

Never built a palafitta by hand, but I'm not sure it makes sense for the foundation poles to be only on the external perimeter.

rlp• 6 years ago

This is really cool, but I've always been disappointed that you can't generate Houdini procedural content in UE4 at runtime. It only works in the editor.

Torkel• 6 years ago

Here's the twitter profile of Anastasia Opara: https://twitter.com/anastasiaopara

I recommend following her - she does amazing things at Embark Studios these days :)

Daub• 6 years ago

Lots of wise observations in TFA.

'Most people probably do not directly register it, but we are great pattern recognition machines, and to make procedural generation believable the patterns we face on daily basis should be present.'

Absolutely true. Most artists know this, but are unable to effectively describe these patterns. Instead, these patterns 'posses' them, and from this possession comes the art. Its kinda like the car driving the motorist.

'For me, this process resembles painting: first, you make very wide and general brush strokes and only then, when you are satisfied with that stage, you start refining and adding specifics.'

A simple observation, but very true. The student mistake is to obsess over details (small features) before the layout (large features) phase is complete. The lack of an undo in oil painting taught me a lot about process.

KineticLensman• 6 years ago

I slowly realised similar principles when character posing in Daz Studio:

* Work from the core body (hip and 'spine') out to the extremities

* Weight bearing limbs first

Only then obsess about the positions of the fingers

I wish the documentation had said this as well as going on about the mechanics of the user interface

1MachineElf• 6 years ago

This looks like the Fallout 4 Far Harbor expansion mod that I've always wanted.

jimmcslim• 6 years ago

Don't forget https://twitter.com/OskSta and TownScaper https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/

FlashBlaze• 6 years ago

Didn't know he did that in Houdini. Thought it was a Unity project.

ur-whale4• 6 years ago

Houdini is a great tool, but caveat emptor: proprietary tool.

winrid• 6 years ago

Wow. Now throw this into an MMO! :)

thdrdt2• 6 years ago

Christopher Alexander wrote a lot of books with rules for building. He also said in one of his talks that he could imagine software that could generate a building (or the basic form) with the rules as constraints but with user input for the details.

I believe that would be great to have. And this post looks very promising that such software is possible.

preommr• 6 years ago

There's a pretty cool project by oskar stalberg that does something like that (arguably even better because the output is often very beautiful).

https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1266264444276858884

icebraining• 6 years ago

Arguably the first iteration of that was Sketchpad (1963). You had a template with rules, then you could change parameters (e.g. size) and it'd apply the template rules to the new input.

Here's an Alan Kay talking about it in 1987: https://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987?start=249.5

coolgeek• 6 years ago

Author alert: "The The lake houses..."

Procedural Lake Village

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