MATERIALS & SHADERS

I spent a bit of time working on some materials in the beginning of the week because I needed a break from Houdini. I worked on some substance designer materials, as well as making a show shader in Unreal, by using parts of the designer material. This snow shader consisted of a bit of experimentation, but I wanted to get it right as snow will be such a big part of the environment. I made the first version based on my own knowledge of how Subsurface materials worked and whatnot but then made an improved material after doing more research and then combined things I learnt with things that worked well in the old material to make V2.

Some of the Substance Designer materials:

CUSTOM BUILDING GENERATOR

I then bit the bullet and decided to create a custom building generator as I would be happier with the end results than if I just used the Houdini one. So, I mainly spent the rest of this week trying to dissect the Houdini building gen to see how it functions and how I could use that and alter/build upon it to make my own.

As there are two major things I would like my building generator to have: 

1. Fix the corner issue (I realized the probable reason for this issues that Houdini’s building generator was intended to build facades, using planes for walls, however my tool has depth to the walls and this the overlapping issue happens, I'm not 100% certain but fairly certain).

2. Houdini’s building tool only allows you to define a pattern per entire floor, and I found for some of the more oddly shaped buildings this caused weirdness in the pattern (unless I got super micromanage-y in the pattern definition). For my building generator I am going to add another layer to the patterns to allow more flexibility in floor patterns.

Pattern per wall 

(defines a unique pattern per plane change) 

 ⇩ 

Pattern per floor 

(adds all the wall patterns to a floor)

 ⇩

 Pattern per building 

 (adds all the floors to a building)

BREAKDOWN

I started by breaking down and understanding the function of the “utility” node and then proceeded to make my own. (Having only the most basic functionalities but I will be able to expand on it in the future):

The basic function of this node is to define either a model or floor pattern then the node gathers and stores data within variables for the node that actually assembles the buildings.

This was the basic way that the Houdini node worked.

I then attempted to add my own functionality to allow for the per wall pattern. Currently the tool will analyze itself and determine how many unique walls it has and then allow the user to define a pattern per wall. (Currently adding the slots in the UI is manual but ideally it will automatically update the number of UI slots to match the number of unique walls the floor has.). Then all this information is sent to the building node.

I spent a bit of time diving into the actual building from patterns node however I haven't had much luck on cracking that functionality yet.