Building asset creation tool

[PaulJChris 140]

For a while now, whenever i get the urge to create some buildings for City skylines , I usually start with enthusiasm and then wane when I remember how much work each one takes.  I have been furloughed from work so have  some free time.  I wanted to create a tool that can help to create building assets more quickly , deal with the texture /UV process more intuitively and allow the quick creation of wealth level variants for the same building running of the same texture map, or quickly create variations of the same building to fill all the 12 different lot size permutations also while running from the same texture map.   Previously using 3DSmax to model I have been learning Houdini to try to apply its considerable workflow optimizations  from working procedurally to City Skylines asset building creation.

So far I have a working beta  tool that will:

1/ Allow you to draw any desired size or shaped  building footprint 

2/ Set the number of floors and height of each floor

3/  Divide each segment of wall for each floor into as many or few modules as required

 

4/  Automatically create a realistic pitched roof model for any size of building or switch to a flat roof

At the moment this allows you to quickly create an un-textured  3d building model and export it  in OBJ format as well as quickly creating variations.

Due to the procedural nature of Houdini , any of these steps can be changed throughout the process, so if you say go back to step one and change the shape of the building , all the rest of the following steps will change immediately to reflect your changes.

The further development will be to:

1/ Add an interface to allow the user to  import custom sub meshes copying them  to each coloured  segment preserving their uvs and texture if provided. Each segment of the same colour  is the same size and will have exactly packed UVs.  You will either be able to provide sub modules that precisely fit the footprint you have drawn or the tool will dynamically re-scale your modules to fit the template you have produced.  Think mix and match from difference building models, take the door module from one building ,add a window module from another etc . I have lots of old models that could be broken up into submodels and quickly turned into something new with this.

2/ auto Fuse duplicated points to optimize for low poly demands of Skylines

2/ Auto resolve the UV packing of all the supplied modules and allow the user control over the UV size weighting to the results can be seen in real time.   The user can then  judge the texel density (texture quality)/ detail trade off much more quickly.  Houdini absolutely excels at this because of its procedural nature.

Anyone interested in testing this early beta to provide some feedback and influence the ongoing development , especially any  asset creators  out there please let me know here in this thread and  I will send you the Houdini file  to test.  You do not need to be an expert in Houdini to load this tool and play around with a few sliders.  Houdini apprentice edition is a free download from SideFX website :https://www.sidefx.com/buy/#houdini0  Once installed you will need to add the game dev LABS toolset from within the application which this tool makes use of ,  short step by step video on how exactly how  to do this here :