Procedural Siheyuan(with modern design)
Final Siheyuan Assets in Openworld
Research
A siheyuan is a historical type of residence that was commonly found throughout China, most famously in Beijing and rural Shanxi. Throughout Chinese history, the siheyuan composition was the basic pattern used for residences, palaces, temples, monasteries, family businesses, and government offices.
The Original Idea is to create a whole old city with Siheyuan.
However, during the research, I found some really interesting architecture redesign by Arch Studio in Beijing.
And I would like to try to see with limited modeling tools in Houdini, can we achieve the similar result that supposes to use grasshopper and NURBS
Because the designer provides the isometric view of the redesign,
it helps me understand where is the traditional building and where the new design.
This also helps me to separate these into different HDAs so that users can pick which one to choose later.
Technical Breakdown
The first issue I need to solve is how to procedurally control these curves with limited NURBS modeling tools.
I did many tests and find that using curvsect node will be helpful for defining which part of the NURBS I want to have and which part needs to be delate.
The process is tedious but it will run for the basic needs.
Once we test out the procedural way to control these nubrs line, we can conver back to polygon and do the simple extrude.
Another issue that modern architecture used is called “contour“.
These basic commend in rhino cost some time to investigate how to recreate in Houdini.
The method I approach is to draw the NURBS line first and then use soft control to control how the points move up and down.
The contour can be created by boolean with 100 grids in empty space.
After we get the line, it is easy to convert it into the polygons.
Final result of the top
Roof is simple
The only problems is how to make the angle controlable.
In order to control these angles, NURBS is still the best way to control them.
So I used a couple of NURBS lines to convert to polyline so that we will have control points out of the HDAs.
Each wall can have different types of assets as the each one of them are a single hda that will be procedueraly changed based on overall length.
The side part is using responsivle design like the web design, as length going to too thin, it will change the mode to thin version.
