-
Final (Week XIV)
Final Materials Archive
-
Week XIII
Updating the textures for the City Gate Updating the textures for the Single Building and Testing it in Unreal Engine as a whole Updating Basic Unit Blocks The two new variants of basic unit blocks “full brick ground” and “full grass ground” have been made, among which the “full brick ground” is subdivided into two side branches, “rich vegetation” and “sparse vegetation”. This display level shows all the prepared and read-to-use basic unit blocks (including all the variants). An overview of the latest basic unit blocks applied City Layout Improving Plan Problem: All the blocks are now vertical, facing the
-
Week XII
Testing the HDA in Unreal Engine 5 to make sure most of the features work correctly and properly. Updating the roof of the building so that it can adjust the thickness attribute. Fixed some bugs. Prefabricated Asset – Pavilion Updating Terrain Tool City area can be defined on the surface of the terrain Added a feature to increase the mountain fluctuation Now we can create more natural river Updating Shape Grammar Application Updated the data table structure A debugging feature has been added to make it easier for the team to test the application results Fixed some bugs Prepare for
-
Week XI
Progress update for a single building HDA version with integrated dougong (bracket set) and windows. Solved the problem of the L-system facing The L-system is not making the corner facing correct directions Solution: using clip node to change the L-system rules Prefabricated asset – Landmark Tower made with reference to Kaiyuan Temple Prefabricated asset – Ward Gate made with reference to Mingde Gate The 1×2 basic unit blocks made last week have been optimized so that the final build would not cause too much performance stress when tiling several wards. The main optimized part is vegetation.
-
Week X
The current logic of the pipeline can be summarized as follows: artificially prefabricating part of the building modules, procedurally modeling the remaining building modules in Houdini, and implementing the combination and landing of the single buildings in Houdini. The generated single buildings enter the engine along with other artificial prefabricated assets (such as some decorations) into the second half of the pipeline. In the second half of the pipeline, the basic unit blocks of “1×1” and “1×2” are first prefabricated manually. Shape Grammar uses these basic unit blocks to generate larger blocks, such as “2×2” and “2×3”, and then the
-
Week IX
According to the production scheme of the single buildings, a part of the building modules is completely procedurally generated and the other part is manually prefabricated. Now we are going to merge some of the prefabricated building modules into Houdini, including dougong (bracket set), doors and windows. The results of the merge also require some processing to match the bite, position, and dimensions between the modules. Import Dougong (Bracket Set) with Stash Node Stash Input: the node will cook the input and cache the geometry in a data parameter. Import Windows Test the position, number and fit of the combined
-
Week VIII
After the fall break, we started the second half of the project. We had the playtest day of this semester on October 29th. Over the course of a full day of playtesting, we received 21 survey responses. The participants were all adults, and nearly half of them have technical or art knowledge background and experience, which exceeded our expectations. The testing process started with guests being invited to watch an overview video, and then they experienced our real-time demo, navigating the procedurally generated Tang Dynasty cityscape from either a first-person or third-person perspective. If the guests have some technical development
-
Week VI & VII
One of the most important goals of Week VI was to get the entire pipeline through and have a Half milestone version of the full demonstration. For the past few weeks, some of the modules in the pipeline have been in relatively independent, simultaneous development. In view of the different technical difficulties, breakthroughs have been made respectively, and some progress has been made. Now it is time to merge these modules and validate a full version of the pipeline. In the following Week VII, we would reach the Half milestone, and we should be fully prepared for it.
-
Week V
We have added an option of Resources to the main menu bar of this site that links to the public Notion page of our project. We share more private information and development details about the team on this public page. You can find the development items, progress, and issues of the project for that week in the Weekly Schedule sub-page. The Technical Development sub-page contains a number of modular and class-based development summaries and experiences. In the References sub-page we share a lot of materials, stream medias, tutorials, source files, etc. that have been very helpful in our process of
-
Week IV
Last week and before 1/4, we tried to prototype the city layout generation using Subdivision algorithm. It can realize some custom adjustments when dividing the blocks and add some restrictions. However, many factors need to be considered in the generation of historical cityscape of Tang Dynasty, such as the type of blocks, types of residents, cultural characteristics and so on, as well as the internal layout and relationship of each block. We need to dig into more materials and historical facts and develop more appropriate layout generation algorithms for such historical features. In such a situation we encountered some technical
-
Week III
Week III was the 1/4 Walkthrough of the project. The logic and process of our presentation was: giving a brief introduction of the background and overview of the project, according to our pipeline sequence guests were invited to each computer to watch real-time demonstrations. This type of communication was more interactive and participative than sitting through the presentation. At the same time, it was easier for the guests to understand the demonstration in the order of our pipeline. Our team was very happy with the results of the 1/4 Walkthrough, which overall met our expectations.
-
Week II
Researching the algorithms for generating city layout In the technical part, we mainly researched the generation algorithms related to the city layout in the second week. The layout of cities varies throughout the time. For example, the people in Tang dynasty designed their city with grids and squares. On the contrary, modern cities appear to have more curve lines in their streets. One of our goals is to create multiple algorithms that can generate city layouts with different needs. In the course of our research, we referred to several representative methods implemented in Houdini and Unreal Engine, which provided us
-
Week I
As a project initiated by the pitch, the overall development goal is relatively clear. In the early stage we have defined the main direction, expectations, and deliverables of the project. So, in the first week of the team meeting and the weekly meeting, we reviewed the above and consolidated the consensus again. In terms of the specific development work, the following contents were mainly completed in the first week: 1. Discussed and settled on a formal name for the team (Artisan) As a project with Chinese historical architecture and culture as its background, we tried to come up with a
