Product work
This week I started to work on the Procedural Generation of the houses in Houdini. Since my experience with the topic is very limited, I started with a bit of desk research on the topic to understand what could be the different methods of approach. Additionally, I attended this week a Houdini masterclass organized for the VFX minor, where I had the opportunity to get some insights from a professional. I started the research by asking myself the main questions:
What would be the technical feasibility for the client?
What would be an approach that would align with my teammate learning goals?
Since the client wants the product to be widely accessible (we will build it for PC use) and my teammate wants to create modular geometry (using separate geometry that can be combined with each other to create different end products), creating the houses in Houdini from scratch was out of the options. From my research (and from asking the Houdini professional) I pinpointed 3 main ways of approaching the task:
Creating a building tool within Houdini (this method consists of creating a building tool within Houdini that would be imported in Unreal Engine; this tool would allow to replace placeholder cubes with modular assets).
Assembling the modular pieces in Unreal Engine directly (this method involves using a procedural building generation tool available within the Unreal Engine marketplace).
Assembling the modular pieces in Houdini and offer randomization parameters for Unreal Engine (this method involves importing the modular pieces and do all the randomization logic within Houdini and then using parameters to control the randomization in Unreal Engine).
After careful analyze* I came to the conclusion that the best approach would be first way "Creating a building tool within Houdini". It advantages include:
The modules do not need to be imported in Houdini and exported afterwards
High level of control over the generated buildings
It will not mess up the UVs and Textures created by other artists
The base cubes on which the house will be generated can have different sizes
Next week I will experiment with this method and see in practice how well it fits our product.
*The complete analyze can be found on OneDrive in the document"DTC_RD_ProceduralHouseAssemblyV01"
Shaders
This week I learnt about the Fresnel effect (the reflection and transmission of light when incident on an interface between different optical media (Wikipedia contributors, 2023c)) and Dot product (an algebraic operation that takes two equal-length sequences of numbers and returns a single number (Wikipedia contributors, 2023a)) and their potential uses in Shader creation. A few examples would be:
Dot product exclusively:
Allowing for picking a specific texture from the textures packed within different channels
Desaturation of a color image
Fresnel (the dot product equation can be used to create a fresnel effect) :
Cloth shader
Allowing certain elements of the shader to be seen only at a specific angle
Creating more believable reflective surfaces
Additionally, I learnt a bit about the Sine equation (mathematical function that is commonly used to model periodic phenomena such as harmonic oscillators (Wikipedia contributors, 2023b)) and how it could be used for looping an oscillation animation in a shader.
Houdini
Since we had a vacation before this week and the topic that I am currently learning (Particle Simulation), I felt the need to revisit the course learning sources that I already watched one more time.
References
Wikipedia contributors. (2023a, August 4). Dot product. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_product
Wikipedia contributors. (2023b, October 9). Sine and cosine. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_and_cosine
Wikipedia contributors. (2023c, October 22). Fresnel equations. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations
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