thedanadamsusa

Thanks for the heads-up, Fenolis - I recently found KM's roof tool in the interim, and it works pretty well. Thanks also for the tip for porch sections. Very much appreciated.

Hi All, I'm looking for some advice on something I’m struggling with. I have been looking into procedural building creation, and I’ve seen two approaches; make a procedural building which can then be scattered, or use Lab Tools Building Gen - with OSM data, and use a kit-of-parts solution. I’ve done some proof-of-concept tests with both options, but they both have limitations. The first option gives you random variations - albeit in a limited way, because the variation isn’t completely controlled. The second option - with Labs and OSM, definitely gives you more control over what you’re creating, and enables the layout of actual locations. The problem is I want to make a residential neighborhood with a specific style of house, these are all either 1, or 2 story homes - please see example attached. So far, the biggest issue is I can't find any explanation of how would handle the sloped roof procedurally. The Labs/OSM solution is great for cities, where buildings mostly have a flat roof - this works really well. I need to create variations of a certain type of home where some have bay windows, some have a porch on the ground floor - some all across the front, some only half-way across. I can add specific variation to individual buildings using either hand-placed overrides, or volume overrides. But it's the roofs which vary based on the footprint of the house that I cannot fathom - so different for each house, and I need it to be procedural. Does anyone out there have any suggestions on how I might best approach this, as I’m hitting a dead-end currently? Thanks in advance!

Hi All, I know many of the fluid effects for these titles was achieved with Realflow. But does anyone have any advice on the best approach in Houdini to achieve this particular head-splitting effect - please see attached? Many Thanks, Dan

Hi, I am in the process of setting up a sky full of clouds - using VDBs. I have set up an early proof-of-concept test, can render it, and it all works out of the box. What I'm struggling with is how to maximally optimize it. I have seen an Arnold setup in Houdini, similar to mine, with 3000 cloud objects - using ass files and rendering an HD1080 frame in around 5 minutes, and using less than 100Mb of memory. Pretty efficient! My Redshift test, has a similar number of VDBs exported out as a single rs proxy which is then instanced across scattered points on a grid. I expected this to speed up the rendering process significantly. Sadly, it actually takes over 4 hours at the same resolution and uses more than 5Gb of memory! What I want to do is leverage the power of proxies and instancing to render this setup and at least match what can be done in Arnold - Redshift is after all a definitively faster render engine. Does anyone know an efficient and effective workflow for this type of solution please? I feel like I've missed something here; as usually Redshift is very fast. Many Thanks, Scott