
Procedural Lake Village - memexy
https://www.anastasiaopara.com/lakevillage
======
_bxg1
Houdini is an incredibly cool tool:
[https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/](https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/)

One of the things I most dislike about tools like Blender is that it can be
really hard to go back to earlier stages of the process and make adjustments.
Most changes are destructive, even though they don't really need to be. I
follow lots of digital artists on Twitter and some of them use Houdini, and
the kind of stuff they can generate is just mindblowing.

I'd try it out myself if it weren't for the price; I've always been drawn to
procedural creation as a bridge between what a person imagines and what they
can get a computer to render.

~~~
memexy
Is the price really the blocker? How much does it cost? I looked at the indie
edition and it seemed affordable. They also have a free edition:
[https://www.sidefx.com/buy/#houdini-
free](https://www.sidefx.com/buy/#houdini-free).

~~~
_bxg1
Affordable, but a little hard to justify as a casual user who just wants to
mess around and doesn't really plan on building anything complete

~~~
dtf
It’s completely free for the casual user who just wants to mess around, as
long as they don’t use it for commercial work. Almost all features supported,
except external renderers and certain geometry exports.

There are some great free tutorials here:
[https://entagma.com/](https://entagma.com/)

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Daub
Lots of wise observations in TFA.

'Most people probably do not directly register it, but we are great pattern
recognition machines, and to make procedural generation believable the
patterns we face on daily basis should be present.'

Absolutely true. Most artists know this, but are unable to effectively
describe these patterns. Instead, these patterns 'posses' them, and from this
possession comes the art. Its kinda like the car driving the motorist.

'For me, this process resembles painting: first, you make very wide and
general brush strokes and only then, when you are satisfied with that stage,
you start refining and adding specifics.'

A simple observation, but very true. The student mistake is to obsess over
details (small features) before the layout (large features) phase is complete.
The lack of an undo in oil painting taught me a lot about process.

~~~
KineticLensman
I slowly realised similar principles when character posing in Daz Studio:

* Work from the core body (hip and 'spine') out to the extremities

* Weight bearing limbs first

Only then obsess about the positions of the fingers

I wish the documentation had said this as well as going on about the mechanics
of the user interface

------
jimmcslim
Don't forget [https://twitter.com/OskSta](https://twitter.com/OskSta) and
TownScaper
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/)

~~~
FlashBlaze
Didn't know he did that in Houdini. Thought it was a Unity project.

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Torkel
Here's the twitter profile of Anastasia Opara:
[https://twitter.com/anastasiaopara](https://twitter.com/anastasiaopara)

I recommend following her - she does amazing things at Embark Studios these
days :)

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cafxx
Impressive demo, although...

Never built a palafitta by hand, but I'm not sure it makes sense for the
foundation poles to be only on the external perimeter.

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thdrdt
Christopher Alexander wrote a lot of books with rules for building. He also
said in one of his talks that he could imagine software that could generate a
building (or the basic form) with the rules as constraints but with user input
for the details.

I believe that would be great to have. And this post looks very promising that
such software is possible.

~~~
preommr
There's a pretty cool project by oskar stalberg that does something like that
(arguably even better because the output is often very beautiful).

[https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1266264444276858884](https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1266264444276858884)

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ur-whale
Houdini is a great tool, but caveat emptor: proprietary tool.

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1MachineElf
This looks like the Fallout 4 Far Harbor expansion mod that I've always
wanted.

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coolgeek
Author alert: "The The lake houses..."

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rlp
This is really cool, but I've always been disappointed that you can't generate
Houdini procedural content in UE4 at runtime. It only works in the editor.

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winrid
Wow. Now throw this into an MMO! :)

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GuiA
Title needs [2016]

