Procedural town builder

[thedanadamsusa]

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!

Edited January 11, 2022 by thedanadamsusa
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[Fenolis]

Konstantin Magnus has a tutorial on creating simple sloped roofs. You can take the straight skeleton of the building footprint, and offsetting the points with neighbourcount of 1 (endpoints) to create more vertical faces.

To create porch sections, you can use Knife to cut parallel to one of the edges of the footprint (this edge should also be parallel to the corresponding 2D convex hull edge, which can be achieved with Triangulate2D). Then just adapt the Labs Building Generator procedures to your needs for generating facade sections.

[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.