Procedural City
This project was started as a challenge to see how many unique buildings I could render at once, and slowly spiraled into a full-blown generative city design tool. Using probabletrain's map generator as a base, fully detailed and textured cityscapes can easily be generated in Houdini and rendered with Octane.
I approached this by creating basic building shapes, then measuring them to create relevant attributes in order to instance various props (such as doors, windows, balconies and pipes). Since the actual detail on each building is instanced using the GPU, each prop has a much smaller memory footprint, and can be culled based on visibility to improve performance.
This instancing technique is efficient enough to render thousands of unique buildings all at once.
Even with placeholder props, I found myself having lots of fun exploring streets and alleyways to find interesting new perspectives. I'm excited to expand this idea in the future to showcase its utility for designing individual buildings, and versatility for different architectural styles.