Houdini Digital Asset: City Builder

The aim of the Houdini project was to create a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) for generating a city that 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, streetlamps are arranged. The shape of the whole city and the street layout can be controlled using different methods; a variety of different patterns can determine the location and orientation of the objects. 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:

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

Results achieved with the HDA:

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.