HSE200 Hard Surface and Environment Modelling
Assessment 2: Collection of 3D Assets
Marwa Hussein
Student ID:A00038197
This is a step-by-step process behind the procedural medieval ruins modules.
We begin by modeling the wall in Houdini.
There are two main pieces; wood and stone/bricks.
I’ll start by making the stone background. It’s just a grid with measurements given in the reference, 3 m wide, 4 m high, and 0.5 m thick. I’ve given it a bit of resolution that will be used later for deforming.
The plan for wooden planks is to have points with attributes and copy boxes on them. For horizontal border ones, I placed a line and matched it to the stone background, min on X, max on Z, and sized it to the Y axis.
With the attribute wrangle we set the up and N attributes for copying later.
Now points of the line are at the edge of the wall, we need to pull them down/up by half of the width of planks that are going to be placed.
By sorting the points on the Y we are sure it’s 0 on the bottom and 1 on the top. Now we can use transform to transform the top one down by half the plank width and the bottom one up. We also need to transform the bottom one by the amount stated in the reference, 0.25 m.
We then just place a divided and UVed box, again for deformation later.
For the horizontal plank in the middle we’ll use a carve node to add a point at a certain place between the border ones. In the carve we’ll keep inside and outside because we’ll use it later for vertical border planks.
Carve created duplicate points so I put a fuse to keep only 3. Again we sort points by Y and blasted everything except the middle one. Set the N and up attributes again.
Before we place the middle plank I’ll create the attributes for vertical planks. With the wrangle I set the length of the planks. Length is calculated using the length of lines between 3 points.
For example bottom point and middle point. Length equals the distance between two points minus the half of width each of the border and the middle plank.
Now using the attributes set on the points we copy boxes. Again divided and UVed.
Now it’s the deformation I was talking about. For planks, we have two levels, macro deformation, and micro deformation. For the stone wall, it’s only one.
The last step is assigning the materials.
With the wall done other modules are pretty much the same thing for the base.
To make the doors we just boolean a box out of the whole thing and UV it again to make sure everything looks right.
For corners, it’s again the same mechanism. The dimensions are just different and we have two grids this time.
As I said the same mechanism, it’s just now in a for loop on each grid. One thing that’s added is the aw to transfer the class attribute. We’ll need it later to rotate on piece by 90 degrees.
Corners need a vertical plank in the middle and we’ll make it the same way as before, it’s just in the middle between two grids now.
The last thing is to extrude the back of the corner and UV it again because UVs get streched.
The second part of the project is materials. First is the wood.
Making wood is really straightforward, we need a grain texture, some knots, and then just layer a bunch of directional noise and that’s pretty much what I did.
Colors are sampled from a picture.
The second material is a stone wall. We use a tile generator, warp the shape of bricks and layer some noise on top.
An interesting method I found is to blend darken a bunch of gradients from flood fill and that creates a stone chipped effect.
The last one is dirt, it’s just simple layered noises.
