"Hidden In Flesh" Devlog #9: I finally Finished the Temple

Finishing the Temple Model

I finally finished the japanese temple generator! Well, mostly. I finished it to the extent that I have time to finish it before Level Up. Here's how it looks in Houdini rn:

Since my last Devlog, I've finished making the false top floor of the building! I used more or the same method for the walls as the bottom floor. I also filled up the "attic" with some basic wooden planks. For the faux balcony,  I used a fence generator I created in Houdini last semester in the Houdini class. It required some fiddling with, but I got it working eventually!

Adding UVs

I also added Uvs to everything using the method shown below, which one of my profs showed me in once class:

Basically, I assign different parts of the model different 'unreal_material' string attributes, that can be changed in the 'controller'. I then 'copied reference'' from Material assets in my Unreal Engine project file. 

Importing Into Unreal Engine

I then imported the HDA into Unreal Engine and baked it into a model. This is how it looks like with some textures:

I had to bake the temple as a full model rather than as a point cloud because I didn't have time to figure out how to do that. Ideally, rather than creating a full model as a single static mesh, I would bake multiple static meshes for the wall module, door frame module, roof quarter module, etc. Then, I'd also bake out a PointCloud so the different modules could be automatically assigned to their proper places without having someone assemble the buildings (as you would with a modular asset pack). 

I do plan to finish this part of the HDA after graduation, as that would result in both smaller game file size and also be more optimized in-game, but I had to make do for Level Up.

More Stuff

I also had to spend a lot more time adding different parameters and controls to the HDA in Houdini. I usually don't bother with that until the end, cuz in the process of developing and prototyping the HDA I end up changing a bunch of things in the node network and going back and changing a million different control a parameters would be extremely tedious. However, since I was more or less done for now and wanted to use the HDA to make a bunch of different buildings, updating the controller became increasingly important. It's not really exciting to show or talk about though, since while the HDA changed on a technical level, the temple model itself didn't actually change. The new changes will just make using it much faster and easier.

Next Steps

My next steps will be to finally use the HDA I spent month working on to create a bunch of different buildings, import them all into Unreal, and make a pretty showcase level.