Tanja Munz

Science meets Art

Houdini Digital Asset: City Builder

The aim of the Houdini project was to create a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) for generating a city which can be configured with a user interface.

The main areas of this city are city blocks, parks, streets and pavements. In city blocks, buildings and trees can be placed; in parks only trees are located. Streets can be used by vehicles and on the pavements street lamps are arranged. The shape for the whole city and the street layout can be controlled using different methods; the location and orientation for the objects can be determined by a variety of different patterns. The asset contains five base geometric models to be distributed in the city. Each of these models is used in a different way for the city. For each of them it can be chosen whether the real geometry or bounding boxes shall be used as the visualization of the real models could be quite expensive.

Some city layouts using bounding boxes:

cityLayout_1 cityLayout_2 cityLayout_3

Available models (high-rise building, small building, street lamp, tree and vehicle):

cityModels

Results achieved with the HDA:

cityScene_1 cityScene_2 cityScene_ufos

The video shows how to create different city layouts, how to change relations and arrangements of geometry and that bounding boxes can be replaced by models.