Product work
I continued on trying to find a solution for the issue I had with the rotation. While looking for solutions online I realized that what I was trying to achieve with the procedural generation of the buildings was too complex for my level. The main complexity was related to the roof system. The type of roof we need could not be created with the "Labs, Building from Patterns" tool. It needed a separate system in order to accomplish the roof adapting to the building size and shape. I communicated my concerns with the team and after careful consideration, we decided with the artist that created the modular pieces to approach the modularity in a different manner. Instead of relying on "pieces of wall" as the modular piece, we would have an entire floor to represent the modular piece. That would allow us to highly optimize the product, which is very beneficial for making it inclusive, a feature demanded by the client.
This shift solved the roof issue and optimized the final product, however, it made the "Labs, Building from Patterns" tool irrelevant since it depends on "pieces of wall" as modular pieces. I started to create a custom tool tailored for our needs. First I had to figure how to create the point cloud in Houdini or the points which will represent the position onto which the modular pieces will be placed in Unreal Engine. My approach consisted of creating a vertical group of planes, finding their center points and using those points for the mesh generation.
After the point cloud was set properly, I had to figure out how to make the system understand that the first floor should always be spawned on the first point and the roof always on the last. After some desk research, I found out that there is a node called "Group by range" which allows to identify the first/last point of a system.
Currently, the biggest flaw of the system is that it does not auto-populate the building with the modular pieces. They have to be defined manually in Unreal Engine, which would require too much manual work. This is what I will look into fixing next week.
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