Houdini Archviz

Houdini Architectural Proceduralism was my goto idea and final product. This project was requested by college. I questioned myself whether this would be worth the time spend since it would require a different and unique mindset if done procedural. The picture below is my final render of an apartment in Gothenburg Sweden.

I focused a lot on the construction of the scene rather than the lighting on the scene, even though I have achieved a desired look.

The image below is a close up render of my own procedural Herringbone with inspiration from youtube showcases and tutorials.

The procedural herringbone is a mix of arrays and randomization.  In the video below I showcase how much control I have with my shader and object customization.

In the video I showcase a mix of SOPs and SHOPs techniques that aid to the development.

I start off with creating the arrays. I align two rectangle boxes that forms a herringbone design and from there I send them off to copy and transform nodes to properly array them out. After that I send them into a for each loop which basicly makes sure that each object (wood panel) has a unique uv set, so we don't see duplicated textures all around the flooring.

I then create a color control so I can change the saturation and create a colorramp to properly color the floor. I also make sure to set the color to focus on vertices, because then it gradients its colors around the panel nonuniformly. A boolean is then applied to make sure the flooring only fits itself within the walls.

90% of the models and textures are all made within Houdini with the help of Redshift Shaders. Plants and the background City of Gothenburg is downloaded. The City in the background is actually ripped from Google earth itself with the Help of a plugin for the 3d software Blender, where I then send it to Houdini. 

I am using RenderDoc to export the data I need for the plugin to read. After export to Houdini I had a problem with the materials. They were all asigned to mantra, the native renderer of Houdini. Then my teacher and I came up with idea of using Python to make it work. The reason for Python usage is because the city consisted of over 500 different models and because of that we had to automate it.

The reason I went with 3D models as the background is mainly because of the volume scattering which acts as fog. If I were to use an image I would have problems with lighting, volume scattering and perspective not matching properly.

The models in the videos below are all procedural. I choose to use splines for all the dishes and bowls, mainly because of the fast control I needed to have. The same goes for the radiator. I like to have control over my models to make sure I can change them if I want to and make sure they are non destructive. This does not apply for all the downloaded models.