The restrictions I had were mostly polycount related. I knew that a lot of the meshes would be used multiple times throughout one building. As I didn’t have any experience with this workflow I didn’t know what my hard limit would be. I was developing the tool while also building the modules, so I had to wait until the end of the mesh implementation phase until I could see whether the polycount was low enough. Especially all pieces including fabrics were problematic as I didn’t have the time to do proper retopology and ended up retaining a lot of polys.

Flexibility

One of my main focuses in the project was complete flexibility to be able to exchange the meshes used in the tool right now. The tool reads the mesh files it is using from a fixed folder structure, so these meshes can be easily exchanged. Either in the folder or as drag & drop inputs inside of Unity. This can completely change the results of the tool, changing the output to an oriental city in place of the shantytown in a few clicks given the correct modules. As the tool inside of Unity has the exact same parameters as in Houdini there are no differences in flexibility. All parameters are accessible and editable inside of Unity. However, whenever I want to change something in Houdini, I need to re-export the .hda and update it in Unity.

Sample City in Unity.

Material Placement

The materials are set up traditionally. This means that every mesh has a material that I created inside of Substance Painter. During the texturing process, I build smart materials based on color ID maps distributing a different kind of metals or wood variations. These were always the same throughout the project. If I wanted to change one of those base materials I could easily re-export the maps. However if this project would have included more modules, or if I had more time I would have set up this whole process in Substance Designer with the Substance Automation Toolkit. In a bigger production, this would definitely be the way to do it.

The texturing itself was a very creative and free part of the project. I could recharge myself for the tougher technical tasks so I enjoyed this bit of manual work a lot. I tried to make the modules feel as if they are actually used and people are actually living in these houses. In the image #05 you see that the sunshades are made out of plastic tablecloth or old curtain fabrics, as this would have been something people have at hand. The walls are spray painted with slogans and sometimes it seems as if somebody started painting over them but stopped as it wasn’t worth the effort. Some hand marks and footprints are visible as well.