Procedural World Generation - Tutorials and Presentations

VanessaCeline

Hey guys! Do you know any good resources (tutorials and presentations) for procedural world / city generation? 
Maybe something that includes Houdini as well, but not necessarily.

Also what tutorials would you recomend to get started with Houdini? 

Yerus

You can get scans from street views from Google Maps with Blender with many different methods, as seen in this guy's videos: 
- https://www.youtube.com/user/Nicko16/videos
For Maya there is a plugin called Maya Structures that generates random buildings:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pPTW8PJdJw
In 3DS Max there is a function called MCG: 
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZODlvDP-fP0
For Photoshop there is a plugin called 3D Map Generator:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plcyi5KvCl8

For Houdini I don't know any specific, but I fear there are a few out there.

VanessaCeline

Hey @Yerus. For the net 6 months I have to create procedural systems and models with a group of students. These seem like already made tools. But thank you! I will check these out and hopefully they can give us some inspiration

jStins

Have you checked out the tutorials hosted by SideFX? https://www.sidefx.com/learn/world-building/

I've been going through the Sci Fi Level Design tutorials by @siver and find them to be quite good.

poopipe

I'm just starting on the same sort of project - I read a bunch of papers and tried a load of existing apps but it's a bit of an unexplored field - the focus in industry seems to be on translating real world(OSM) data. 
City engine pretty much sewed the market up til it got tied up and buried (properly buried, you can't even register for a trial cos the website doesn't work)

This tool seems pretty legit, im planning to adapt it to unreal via some convoluted mash up of python and blueprints over the next few weeks

https://github.com/watabou/TownGeneratorOS

Alternatively there's certainly potential in making use of python graphing libraries for street networks  - the key is in coming up with a plausible distribution of nodes . 

Feel free to drop me a message to discuss ideas - I'm pretty much winging it but two brains are better than one right...

VanessaCeline

@jStins Yes! But I hoped to find something very beginner friendly and structured. Like, with small projects for each little topic. I don't mind if it's a paid course either. I was just wondering what might have worked for others, in order to get a hang of the procedural side of houdini. 

VanessaCeline

@poopipe Are you sure it's not the same project? Sounds pretty much like what we need to do, haha.

Also, as far as I know it should be pretty easy to get it into Unreal with a plugin or something like that? 

jStins

Anastasia Opara is another good source for procedural content generation. She has a few talks online that mainly address her general approach. She also has a series of tutorials on Gumroad based on her Lake Village project, but I haven't bought those and cannot vouch for their quality. 

Good luck and please do keep us posted about any good resources you discover.  

poopipe

VanessaCeline said:

@poopipe Are you sure it's not the same project? Sounds pretty much like what we need to do, haha.

Also, as far as I know it should be pretty easy to get it into Unreal with a plugin or something like that? 

Having dug into the unreal python API recently nothing is straightforward - the documentation is (diplomatically speaking) fucking shit

the hard part here is the algorithms for generating convincing road layouts. Once you have that it's simple enough to generate plots for buildings and then the buildings themselves.
translating object positions to other apps is pretty trivial once you've worked out where they need to be 

Octo

Houdini and Far Cry 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfizT369g60&ab_channel=Houdini
Houdini and Ghost Recon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ_U1_MVKJQ&ab_channel=Houdini

VanessaCeline

Thank you all, I'll be taking notes from all of the resources these weeks!