Procedural, little low poly Village

[sant0s81]

Morning everyone,

I just watched that video here and wonder, how that is done:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYNiIzElaZ0

I would like to create a little, super simple village with some streets and low poly buildings along the streets based on a custom shape.

Is there a tutorial that I could use for that kinda procedural village?

Thanks alot,
sant0s

edit: my guess is to randomly spawn some points on a grid and use the points to create and connect curves and generate the streets based on that curves.
Than scatter and align points next to the street and copy the houses to the points.

 

Edited August 17, 2020 by sant0s81

[Librarian]

try
https://www.houdinikitchen.net/

[sant0s81]

Hey @Librarian

thx for the link - that race track looks interesting.

[sant0s81]

Hey all

I started to try building that Village Generator.

The streets and areas where to scatter the points, are so far quite cool.

But I have a little problem I am trying to solve.

As soon as I change the seed, I have to manualy select the edges, otherwise its a mess.
Oh, just realised, the seed change situation is actually working.

How could I automaticly select the edges?

Another problem I dont understand - as soon as I change the size of the street, its again messing around.

Edit: I guess its solved.
I had to Copy reference the Offset of the street width to the Offset of the inside area...

Thx alot,
sant0s

updated working version:
street_from_curve.hiplc

Edited August 19, 2020 by sant0s81

[sant0s81]

So I got a bit closer, but still have problems I cant solve.

I used Polyframe to align the particles along the curve.
Problem is, that I dont understand, how to get the normals from that curve on the particles, when I scatter them in the building areas and not along the curve/street.

First try was to use another PolyExpand and than scatter only on the outline edges.
But than I have some houses on the streets in smaller areas.

And last but not least, I would like to limit the distance to the curve where the points are scattered. So the houses should not be to far away from the streets.

Someone with an idea how to solve that?

 

village_generator_v001.hiplc

 

Not aligned, but scattered in the building areas:

 

Aligned on the curve, but some on the screets:

Edited August 19, 2020 by sant0s81

[sant0s81]

User PaqWak from Discord helped with aligning and overlapping.
Thx again mate if you can read that!

PaqWak wrote:

Quote

Not perfect, but I would probably go that way. Scatter point on the parcel, relax, compute the distance with the nearest point on the street, delete if lower than a threshold. For the orientation it's the same, picking the normal from the closest point of the street.

village_generator_v002.hiplc

[sant0s81]

PaqWak added another nice feature. Now you can also delete buildings not only to close to the street, but also to far away - so you get kinda like backyards.
Thanks PaqWak!

village_generator_v003.hiplc

[flcc]

You should also be able to erase the houses that are totally surrounded by each other, i.e. they have no access to a "street".

Nice work, by the way.

[sant0s81]

@flcc
Yeah, there are still some construction sites.

Another cool feature would be to start with something like a center point (Church for example).
As closer to the church, as more wealthy.

Actually like in the Anno games where a Church or a University influence the prosperity.

Maybe there is even a way to create districts by adding a gradient to the PolyExpand2D "Inside Output" and than using something like the tag attribute in HF Scatter based on black to white.
 

 

[konstantin magnus]

Here is another example using height field scatter along with slopes for orientation..

town.hipnc

[sant0s81]

@konstantin magnus

thats great. Thx for the example.
I was wondering if its possible to directly use HF scatter since its also more easy to read for UE4 with the variations.
And also to use the on point scatter option in the HF scatter to create some realistic foliage around the houses.
 

Edited August 24, 2020 by sant0s81

[konstantin magnus]

I'd probably build a mask around the houses for plants.

plants_border.hipnc

[sant0s81]

@konstantin magnus

Yes, I do alot with masks.

Definitly use the masks to get more ordered scatter points around the houses (props like barrels, plants, trash etc).

I like the "Per Point Count Using Source Points" feature.
It gives alot of freedom to get natural scattering.

And I think, using the HF scatter to first scatter the buildings and than use the "Per Point Count Using Source Points" can give some awesome results.

 

 

The green points are the original trees from the vegetation class of a LiDAR pointcloud - all the other points are based on the original green points (smaller trees, fern, dead trees/tree stumps, rocks, etc.)

Edited August 24, 2020 by sant0s81

[Deformiter]

Hey all, I just started looking into this and wow, you guys came really far ! Was anything further ever done? Amazing work though