Week 1 and 2 - Planning and loads of Houdini

After the final submission of the 3-week projects, my Final Major Project partner Litha ( https://www.artstation.com/lithabacchi ) and I sat down together and started planning and gathering reference for our project.
We had previously decided to recreate a concept she found on Artstation, Atlas Square by Eddie Mendoza.

Atlas Square - Eddie Mendoza (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ldk5V)

Whilst Litha will be responsible for creating a modular kit, other assets, textures, etc. my first main task will be coming up with a procedural building generator in Houdini, which will probably be quite the challenge, since I have only used Houdini once before, during the Destruction VFX Brief.

1 - Houdini Building Generator

I am currently still in the testing phase and so far have only been working on one floor. Lots of the VEX code needs to be optimised, e.g. putting some code into functions, etc. In the following weeks I will expand the system to work with more different pieces.

1.1 - Building Footprint
After some fiddling around in Houdini I decided to use a Curve to let the user define the corner points of the building. To make sure, that the points of the curve really define corners and are not just in the middle of a straight line, I put the curve through an Attribute Wrangle to remove those points. Essentially I am checking the angle between the edges (defined by the vector between the points on each side of an edge) on each side of a point and remove the ones, where the angle is below a certain threshold.

Before - After

Remove Points Vex

1.2 - Placing corners
After having the optimised footprint I moved on to placing the corner pieces. Since I am using instances for all the pieces I assign an attribute to all the points, called "Instance". Currently I only have one degree simple 45 and 90 degree corner each, but later I will assign those to the points from an array containing all the paths to the geometry files. Right now I am just using the file path to these two files.

To place and rotate those pieces correctly. I use the direction vector of the edge leading up to a point and assigning this vector as the point normal. However, I use atan2 to check, whether the angle is positive or negative and depending on that rotate the normal.

Corner Piece Placement

1.3 - Unique Pieces
Aside from the standard wall and corner pieces we also want the option to add unique pieces, for example storefronts, etc. so I added a multi parameter for those, so the user can add them.
Per piece you can currently chose the piece index ( they are still just basic boxes connected to a switch. Later they will work as instances. ), the building side to place it on, as well as the offset.

Unique Piece Placement

I place those pieces by getting the vector between the edge points, multiplying by offset and adding it to the start point of the edge. In the case of the unique as well as wall piece placement, I set the normal of those points to be perpendicular to the edge direction vector.

Unique Piece Placement VEX

1.4 - Wall Placement
The wall placement proofed to be a bit tricky, since at this point the points, that make up the edges to place the walls on, are not in the right order anymore. Houdini still has them stored as 1,2,3,4....13... instead of 1,2,13,3,4..., if a unique piece (point number 13 ) has been added to an edge.
So I had to figure out how to sort the point indices into the correct order. Since I had already given the unique asset points an attribute storing the edge number, I could use this to do so. Essentially I could sort the points belonging to each edge, excluding the end point, since it is also the start point for the next edge and I do not want to store it twice, based on the distance to the start point. At the end of the "Sorted Indices" array I also added the start point index again, to make any further work easier, instead of having to add a special case for the last edge.
It took me some time to get it right and I definitely have to go back and add a few more comments to the code.

Sorted Indices

Based on these sorted indices I can calculate building side lengths and how many walls I need to place on it. I also added a scale attribute to the points to rescale those wall pieces. I still need to make sure, that if the new scale is below a certain threshold, only plain walls and no window pieces get placed, otherwise we would get unrealistically scaled windows.
To calculate the edge length I also subtract the space taken by corner or unique pieces, using the bounding boxes to do so.

Place wall pieces

This is basically how far I got with the building generator in the 1 1/2 weeks since starting FMP. It involved a lot of research and figuring out how to approach certain problems.
Having sorted those I feel like it will be easier implementing the other planned features.
Here is how the tool looks in action right now:

Walls and unique assets

Building Generator -  Work in progress

2 - Maxscripts

On the side I also have been working on multiple Maxscript tools for Litha to work with.

2.1 - Unwrap Tool
The first tool is for creating quick unwraps, flatten mapping the geometry. You can choose to either have the selected meshes share the UV Space or to unwrap them individually. The UV channel is also selectable.

	try (destroyDialog multitool) catch()
	rollout unwrapTool "Unwrap Tool" width:264 height:184
	(
	GroupBox 'grp_unwrap' "Unwrap" pos:[3,12] width:255 height:163 align:#left
	spinner 'spn_uv_channel' "UV Channel " pos:[10,89] width:132 height:16 range:[1,100,0] type:#integer align:#left
	button 'btn_Unwrap' "Unwrap" pos:[10,135] width:150 height:30 align:#left
	checkbox 'chk_share_uv' "Share UV Space" pos:[10,109] width:240 height:16 align:#left
	label 'lbl_unwrap_description' "Flatten maps selected meshes with option to unwrap to a specific channel or to the same uv space." pos:[10,41] width:240 height:43 align:#left
	on btn_Unwrap pressed do
	(
	selectedObj = getcurrentselection()
	print (selectedObj.count)
	if selectedObj.count != 0 then (
	max modify mode
	convertto selectedObj editable_poly
	subObjectLevel = 4
	if chk_share_uv.state == true then (
	select selectedObj
	UnwrapChannel = spn_uv_channel.value
	uvShared = unwrap_uvw()
	modpanel.addmodtoselection (uvShared)
	uvShared.setTVSubObjectMode 3
	max select all
	uvShared.setMapChannel spn_uv_channel.value
	uvShared.flattenMap 45.0 #([1,0,0], [-1,0,0], [0,1,0], [0,-1,0], [0,0,1], [0,0,-1]) 0.01 true 0 true true
	uvShared.packnoparams()
	uvShared.pack 2 0.001 true true true
	)
	else (
	for obj in selectedObj do (
	modPanel.setCurrentObject obj
	UnwrapModifier = Unwrap_UVW name:"FlattenUVUnwrap"
	addModifier obj UnwrapModifier
	UnwrapChannel = spn_uv_channel.value
	uv = obj.modifiers["FlattenUVUnwrap"]
	uv.setMapChannel UnwrapChannel
	uv.setTVSubObjectMode 3
	max select all
	uv.flattenMap 45.0 #([1,0,0], [-1,0,0], [0,1,0], [0,-1,0], [0,0,1], [0,0,-1]) 0.01 true 0 true true
	uv.packnoparams()
	uv.pack 2 0.001 true true true
	)
	)
	select selectedObj
	convertto selectedObj editable_poly
	)
	else (
	messagebox ("No mesh selected")
	)
	)
	)
	createdialog unwrapTool

view raw MS_Unwrap_Tool.ms hosted with ❤ by GitHub

2.2 - Position and Offset Tool
The next tool was for moving vertices, or vertices of selected faces or edges, to a specified location, or offsetting them. Litha suggested that one to me to help with the creation of the modular pieces. It also has the option to save the current vertex positions and reset back to them, since undoing Maxscript stuff sometimes doesn't work.

	--MOVE TOOL
	--get rid of already opened instances
	try (destroyDialog moveTool) catch()
	--Variables
	oldpos = #();
	--Rollout
	rollout moveTool "Position and Offset Tool" width:295 height:267
	(
	button 'btn_moveToX' "X" pos:[8,66] width:25 height:25 align:#left
	button 'btn_moveToY' "Y" pos:[36,66] width:25 height:25 align:#left
	button 'btn_moveToZ' "Z" pos:[64,66] width:25 height:25 align:#left
	label 'lbl_moveToPos' "Position" pos:[112,66] width:48 height:16 align:#left
	spinner 'spn_moveToPos' "" pos:[156,66] width:112 height:16 range:[-100000,100000,0] align:#left
	label 'lbl_description_mv' "Moves vertices or vertices of selected Edges/ Faces to the defined Position on the X, Y or Z Axis." pos:[11,31] width:280 height:32 align:#left
	button 'btn_reset' "Reset Positions" pos:[147,224] width:135 height:25 align:#left
	button 'btn_saveVertPos' "Save Vertex Position " pos:[6,224] width:135 height:25 align:#left
	GroupBox 'grp_moveToPos' "Move to Position" pos:[6,5] width:284 height:93 align:#left
	GroupBox 'grp_offset' "Offset" pos:[6,104] width:283 height:94 align:#left
	button 'btn_offsetX' "X" pos:[8,169] width:25 height:25 align:#left
	button 'btn_offsetY' "Y" pos:[36,169] width:25 height:25 align:#left
	button 'btn_offsetZ' "Z" pos:[64,169] width:25 height:25 align:#left
	label 'lbl_offsetPos' "Offset" pos:[112,169] width:48 height:16 align:#left
	spinner 'spn_offset' "" pos:[156,169] width:112 height:16 range:[-100000,100000,0] align:#left
	label 'lb_description_offs' "Moves vertices or vertices of selected Edges/ Faces by the defined Offset on the X, Y or Z Axis." pos:[11,128] width:273 height:32 align:#left
	--FUNCTIONS
	--convert selection to Vertices
	fn convertSelection obj = (
	max modify mode;
	vertSelection = undefined;
	--select verts based on subobjectlevel
	--Vertex
	if ( subobjectlevel == 1 ) then (
	vertSelection = polyop.getvertselection obj as array;
	)
	--Edge
	if ( subobjectlevel == 2 ) then (
	edgesSelection = polyop.getedgeselection obj as array;
	obj.EditablePoly.Convertselection #Edge #Vertex
	vertSelection = polyop.getvertselection obj as array;
	)
	--Border
	if ( subobjectlevel == 3 ) then (
	subobjectlevel = 2;
	edgesSelection = polyop.getedgeselection obj as array;
	obj.EditablePoly.Convertselection #Edge #Vertex
	vertSelection = polyop.getvertselection obj as array;
	)
	--Face
	if ( subobjectlevel == 4 ) then (
	facesSelection == polyop.getfaceselection obj as array;
	obj.EditablePoly.Convertselection #Face #Vertex
	vertSelection = polyop.getvertselection obj as array;
	)
	--Element
	if ( subobjectlevel == 5) then (
	subobjectlevel = 4;
	facesSelection = polyop.getfaceselection obj as array;
	obj.EditablePoly.Convertselection #Face #Vertex
	vertSelection = polyop.getvertselection obj as array;
	)
	if ( subobjectlevel == 0) then (
	messagebox ("Nothing selected");
	)
	subobjectlevel = 1;
	print (vertSelection as string);
	return vertSelection;
	)
	-- MOVE TO POSITIONS
	-- move to X
	on btn_moveToX pressed do
	(
	currentObj = $;
	newPos = spn_moveToPos.value;
	if selection.count != 0 then (
	vertSelection = convertSelection(currentObj)
	--set new Position
	if vertSelection.count != 0 then (
	for i in vertSelection do (
	currentObj.verts[i].pos.x = newPos;
	)
	)
	else messagebox("Nothing selected");
	)
	else messagebox ("Nothing selected");
	)
	--move to Y
	on btn_moveToY pressed do
	(
	currentObj = $;
	newPos = spn_moveToPos.value;
	if selection.count != 0 then (
	vertSelection = convertSelection(currentObj)
	--set new Position
	if vertSelection.count != 0 then (
	for i in vertSelection do (
	currentObj.verts[i].pos.y = newPos;
	)
	)
	else messagebox("Nothing selected");
	)
	else messagebox ("Nothing selected");
	)
	--move to Z
	on btn_moveToZ pressed do
	(
	currentObj = $;
	newPos = spn_moveToPos.value;
	if selection.count != 0 then (
	vertSelection = convertSelection(currentObj)
	--set new Position
	if vertSelection.count != 0 then (
	for i in vertSelection do (
	currentObj.verts[i].pos.z = newPos;
	)
	)
	else messagebox("Nothing selected");
	)
	else messagebox ("Nothing selected");
	)
	--VERTEX POSITIONS
	--reset to saved vertex Position
	on btn_reset pressed do
	(
	if oldPos.count != 0 then (
	for i=1 to oldPos.count do (
	$.verts[i].pos = oldPos[i];
	)
	)
	else messagebox ("No positions saved");
	)
	--save current Vertex Positions
	on btn_saveVertPos pressed do
	(
	for i=1 to $.GetNumVertices() do (
	temp = $.verts[i].pos;
	append oldPos temp;
	)
	)
	--OFFSET
	--offset X
	on btn_offsetX pressed do
	(
	currentObj = $;
	offset = spn_offset.value;
	if selection.count != 0 then (
	vertSelection = convertSelection(currentObj)
	--set new Position
	if vertSelection.count != 0 then (
	for i in vertSelection do (
	currentObj.verts[i].pos.x += offset;
	)
	)
	else messagebox("Nothing selected");
	)
	else messagebox ("Nothing selected");
	)
	--offset Y
	on btn_offsetY pressed do
	(
	currentObj = $;
	offset = spn_offset.value;
	if selection.count != 0 then (
	vertSelection = convertSelection(currentObj)
	--set new Position
	if vertSelection.count != 0 then (
	for i in vertSelection do (
	currentObj.verts[i].pos.y += offset;
	)
	)
	else messagebox("Nothing selected");
	)
	else messagebox ("Nothing selected");
	)
	--offsetZ
	on btn_offsetZ pressed do
	(
	currentObj = $;
	offset = spn_offset.value;
	if selection.count != 0 then (
	vertSelection = convertSelection(currentObj)
	--set new Position
	if vertSelection.count != 0 then (
	for i in vertSelection do (
	currentObj.verts[i].pos.z += offset;
	)
	)
	else messagebox("Nothing selected");
	)
	else messagebox ("Nothing selected");
	)
	)
	createdialog moveTool

view raw MS_Position_and_Offset_Tool.ms hosted with ❤ by GitHub

2.3 -Export Tool
This one is pretty self-explanatory. You can copy paste a file location and choose a unit for export. The tool checks, if the location is valid, or asks if you want to create the folder, if it does not exist yet. You can also choose to export meters and centimetres. I will expand this tool in the future.

	--get rid of already opened instances
	try (destroyDialog export_tool) catch()
	rollout export_tool "Export Tool" width:232 height:267
	(
	dropdownList 'ddl_units' "" pos:[105,26] width:120 height:21 items:#("cm", "m") align:#left
	label 'lbl_unit' "Export Unit" pos:[10,26] width:61 height:17 align:#left
	checkbox 'chk_exportMCM' "Export object both in cm and m" pos:[10,53] width:221 height:18 align:#left
	GroupBox 'grp_units' "Unit Setup" pos:[3,7] width:227 height:71 align:#left
	edittext 'edt_exportPath' "" pos:[105,156] width:120 height:20 align:#left
	label 'lbl_exportPath' "Export Path" pos:[10,156] width:90 height:20 align:#left
	label 'lbl_exportPathDesc' "The tool will create the folders 'cm' and 'm' in the specified location, depending on unit setup" pos:[10,108] width:217 height:44 align:#left
	button 'btn_export' "Export FBX" pos:[7,230] width:214 height:30 align:#left
	button 'btn_resetXForm' "Reset X Form" pos:[7,190] width:214 height:30 align:#left
	GroupBox 'grp_exportOpt' "Export Settings" pos:[3,88] width:227 height:94 align:#left
	--check if export path is valid
	fn isExportPathValid exportPath = (
	if edt_exportPath.text != "" then (
	doesExist = doesFileExist exportPath;
	if doesExist == false then (
	createFolder = querybox("Folder '" + exportPath + "' doesn't exist. Do you want to create it?") beep:true;
	if createFolder then (
	success = makeDir exportPath;
	if success then (
	return true;
	)
	else (
	messagebox("Folder could not be created");
	return false;
	)
	)
	else return false;
	)
	else return true;
	)
	else messagebox("Please enter an Export Path");
	return false;
	)
	--EXPORT
	on btn_export pressed do
	(
	selectedObj = getcurrentselection();
	-- is at least one object selected?
	if(selectedObj.count != 0) then (
	--export both m and cm?
	if chk_exportMCM.state == false then (
	exportPath = edt_exportPath.text;
	exportPath = exportPath + "/" + ( ddl_units.selected as string );
	FbxExporterSetParam "convertUnit" (ddl_units.selected as string );
	print(FbxExporterGetParam "convertUnit");
	--is export path valid
	if (isExportPathValid(exportPath)) then (
	for obj in selectedObj do (
	select obj
	originalpos = obj.pos;
	obj.pos = [0,0,0];
	exportPathObj = exportPath + "/" + (obj.name as string);
	print(exportPathObj);
	exportFile exportPathObj #noPrompt selectedOnly:true using:FBXEXP;
	obj.pos = originalpos;
	)
	)
	)--export both m and cm?
	else (
	for i in ddl_units.items do (
	exportPath = edt_exportPath.text;
	exportPath = exportPath + "/" + ( i as string );
	FbxExporterSetParam "convertUnit" ( i as string );
	print(FbxExporterGetParam "convertUnit");
	--is export path valid
	if (isExportPathValid(exportPath)) then (
	for obj in selectedObj do (
	select obj
	originalpos = obj.pos;
	obj.pos = [0,0,0];
	exportPathObj = exportPath + "/" + (obj.name as string);
	print(exportPathObj);
	exportFile exportPathObj #noPrompt selectedOnly:true using:FBXEXP;
	obj.pos = originalpos;
	)
	)
	)
	)
	)--is at least one object selected?
	else messagebox("Nothing selected");
	)
	--RESET XFORM
	on btn_resetXForm pressed do
	(
	selectedObj = getcurrentselection();
	if (selectedObj.count != 0) then (
	for obj in selectedObj do (
	resetxform obj;
	converttopoly obj;
	print( obj.name + " XForm reset " );
	)
	)
	else messagebox("Nothing selected");
	)
	)
	createdialog export_tool

view raw MS_Export_Tool.ms hosted with ❤ by GitHub