This work involves an independent investigation into the capabilities, workflows, and creative applications of the Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) toolset, with a specific focus on developing and optimizing assets for Virtual Reality (VR) experiences. The exploration centers on how HDAs can streamline procedural content creation while addressing the unique performance constraints of VR environments, such as polygon count, texture resolution, and real-time interactivity. By experimenting with custom parameter setups, asset encapsulation, and intuitive interface design, the goal is to create flexible tools that allow rapid iteration of VR-ready environments and props.
Procedural Modeling
Starting with a simple input cube, the tool allow customization of the size in X, Y, Z.
During the first step of defining general dimension, the users are allowed to customize corner’s beveling and irregularity from slightly booleaning the initial cube input.
The tool then take the primitive facing in Z+ direction as the source to spawn random points on its surface. The user then control how many points they would like to have on this electrical box.
These points then will be used to create smaller components inside the final assets. To control which “kind” or “species” of the smaller components, point attributes are assign to each point by user’s input probability.
For example, of 10 points, we can say: 0.4(40%) to have “Switch” attribute, 0.2(20%) to have “CircuitBox” attribute, and so on.
These information then become used to populate premade smaller assets into the box. Next, dynamic modeling details like wires and cables are generated based on these smaller component models.
The tool is set in the way that, for each “Switch” model, on the higest primitive surface, there will be a point with “start” attribute for the wire.
Similarly, for each “CircuitBox” highest primitive surface, there will be a point with “end” attribute. The “start” and “end” attribute for the pairing points then form into a line.
These lines then used to similate the cables with the rest of the models inside the box act as collision objects.
Once smaller objects are placed, the user also has an option to define “empty area.” This can casually acts as negative space in the overall design, or they can use this area to place hero objects or the models they want to emphasize manually.
Procedural Texturing
Procedural texturing starts after the modeling process. The final goal of this process is to acheive mainly 3 texture maps: Color diffuse, Occlusion/Roughness/Metallic, and Normal, to be later used in game. Other maps like Emissive and Height can be acheived if needed as well. Starting with the model, we then bake interesting features like AO (ambient occlusion), curvature, position, and edge normal. Once these technical map is extracted, we can then use random noise like Simplex/Perlin/etc. to multiply with them. First, we take AO multiplying with noise to create an interesting look mimicking dirt, that frequently occur in the hollow gaps between objects. Second, Curvature and Edging information combined with similar randomized noise can create metallic worn edges. Third, this is optional but I frequently used Position map to create a slight gradient based on object world position. Once completing these 3 maps, each map then stored in each R, G, B channel, packed into a single ORM map.
This work involves an independent investigation into the capabilities, workflows, and creative applications of the Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) toolset, with a specific focus on developing and optimizing assets for Virtual Reality (VR) experiences. The exploration centers on how HDAs can streamline procedural content creation while addressing the unique performance constraints of VR environments, such as polygon count, texture resolution, and real-time interactivity. By experimenting with custom parameter setups, asset encapsulation, and intuitive interface design, the goal is to create flexible tools that allow rapid iteration of VR-ready environments and props.
Procedural Modeling Based on Rigging Skeleton
Inverse Kinematic Rig Test