Here is a small selection of some procedural assist tools made with Houdini for past and current projects. While I see plenty of demos of complex procedural setups to assemble things from scratch, there are fewer displays of its use for creating small timesavers to quickly build out variety from existing assets.
Creating damaged versions of buildings or props, atlassing together textures, assembling junk piles, creating controllable assemblies of foliage, etc all take up time in a production environment that could be better spent on actual art, and would need to be redone from scratch if the source pieces changed. These set all that up as systems that you can plug assets into, get a reliable result every time regardless of who's using it, and do it in a nondestructive manner where you can save the network and revisit later if needed.
Atlasser HDA
This tool accepts any number of uniquely textured input assets and combines them into one atlassed texture, the only limit on asset count being the resulting texture resolution desired.
This was made primarily for creating efficient textures for piles of junk and debris, while not being bound to a combined UV layout during the initial asset creation. Turned out to be great for handing work off to outsource, and then having a huge library of junk assets we can pull from as needed.
This was made primarily for creating efficient textures for piles of junk and debris, while not being bound to a combined UV layout during the initial asset creation. Turned out to be great for handing work off to outsource, and then having a huge library of junk assets we can pull from as needed.
Steps:
1. Takes the UVs being used by each of the input meshes (or only those of the selected element, should there be more than one object packed into the input fbx), and packs them into 0-1 UV space.
UV size on the new sheet is based on the scale of the mesh in relation to the rest of the meshes it's being combined with. Scale adjustment is controllable per piece within the tool.
1. Takes the UVs being used by each of the input meshes (or only those of the selected element, should there be more than one object packed into the input fbx), and packs them into 0-1 UV space.
UV size on the new sheet is based on the scale of the mesh in relation to the rest of the meshes it's being combined with. Scale adjustment is controllable per piece within the tool.
2. Using the newly laid out UVs, the tool bakes the textures for each mesh into a single combined texture for each of the channels (e.g., all the base color textures for every mesh are combined into one single base color texture, same for normals, etc). These meshes are written out to an export folder.
3. The tool then combines them into a packed metal, roughness, and AO map, but that was just the format needed for the project this was made for.
Debug layout view option. This spreads out the meshes for easier viewing, but doesn't change the location of the elements upon export. There's also a toggle for switching between the input meshes and the combined mesh with new UVs, while applying the new textures to the meshes to confirm everything lines up as expected.
Junk pile result, using the created single texture.
Rusticator HDA
Tool to take meshes using tiling or unique textures, and carve out rusted holes in them for quick damage variations of the original piece.
Creates rusted out areas in meshes based on curve strokes on the surface. Adjustable stroke width, noise, and warping around hole perimeter.
Controls to add thickness to selectable areas with targeted extrusion.
Unwraps broken areas for a rust material, while leaving the rest of the UVs intact, to use their original textures.
Adds vert color edge around the rusted areas, to allow for a rust overlay to be added to the material.
Ruinator HDA
Takes existing structure models and breaks them apart using shape volumes as inputs. Example showr is a panel and rebar setup. but the process could be adjusted to any multi-layer asset.
The idea is quite simple; any panel or piece that gets intersected with the volumes up to an adjustable percentage of its points is removed. The volumes can be expanded or contracted per layer, to allow for lots of panel removal, but minimal rebar removal, for example. A mask is projected to the mesh with a controllable range, so anything within, say, 10 meters of the edge gets some noise applied, increasing in intensity towards the hole.
To create debris piles, the process is inverted, taking the pieces that were deleted, randomly selecting some of them, and running a simulation on it to create non-intersecting piles that match the damage.
Admittedly a dead simple idea, but I've made enough damaged buildings in my time that I wanted to speed up the process for making broken versions of modular set pieces.
