SideFX Tech Art Challenge 2021 - Cable Conduit Tool

hi everyone how you doing richard here um and i just in this video i just want to go through my entry into side effects um tech art challenge which is pretty exciting um it's until uh the 20 uh the 30th of september 2021 um and it's just a way to sort of engage with the community really it's some really cool stuff up there already which is uh which is awesome to see so if if you're if you feel up for it i'll i'll see you over there and what it is they're asking for either a game asset or a houdini utility so i've gone with um a game asset so in my ongoing quest to find the most boring things in the world to model i decided to do um a procedural okay i don't know why um it just seemed like another one of those assets that would be incredibly tedious to model using uh traditional methods and something that you you know you wouldn't pass on to your your your greatest artist to do for you and a perfect candidate for for some procedural modeling so this is the type of thing that i'm talking about you often see them in the ceiling space of sort of industrial buildings it's where these cables kind of are very very neatly run um in sort of a conduit pattern so i'm thinking it'd work quite well in a sci-fi or an industrial sort of environment for a game and like i said would be really tedious if you were forced to model all these pipes and cables and things by hand so that's kind of the thinking behind it um so these were my main references that i gathered um obviously some very very simple shapes but looking at it you can see lots of repeating elements which you know is ideal for procedural modeling um and obviously there's a lot of variation lots of shapes and sizes lots of different configurations and things so again that sort of said to me that this would be a great candidate for some procedural modeling uh so let's jump into houdini so i'm here in a brand new scene i'm going to drop down an instance of my digital asset um if you want to install it and find it it should be under a subnet a subfolder called banks our hda and it's called cable conduit tool all right so as we can see very very simple i sort of did this in about a day or that wasn't really i don't really have time to spend much but it was a fun project um so here we go we've got the cable conduit tool um as requested in the rules of the competition it's got its own little help card as well which was quite fun to put together so if you unsure of what the parameters do you can just check the help card um it's all pretty much self-explanatory really so here we are in the cable tray tool it requires an input here in houdini so i'm just going to jump to the top viewport make sure i've got grid snapping and i'm creating in context and then i'm just going to drop down a curve um so let's just put down a funky kind of shape to test it with so something like that you can press enter to finish that tool so there's our if you imagine if you were laying out your your level you could sort of sketch around the walls or or things like that and then once we've got our curve and our tool we can just connect them up and initially the tool is in a thing called build mode this is just to enable you to have some really quick method of tweaking the points and so if you know if you want to go in and sort of re-edit some points there's minimal sort of weighting and processing of things like that once you're once you're kind of happy with the with the rough placement of your points you can come back to the tool and turn off build mode and here it is in its default configuration um it's currently set up to be to use two-sided materials in unreal so ignore those uh those back faces there and let's just step through the the parameters so the first parameter we've got is the tray type and i'm calling this a full tray um and we've also got an option for a partial tray so you can see here we're just capturing the the corners of the uh of the cable tray and then the rest of the parameters are pretty self-explanatory we've got a width slider that we can play with we can change the type of support so currently we've got this little simple bolt running through them we can change them over to chains because chains are always cool and then we can have none should we wish we can drop the height so we can place it on the roof and then sort of tweak the the height of the the drop of the of the conduit we've got some spacing of the supports so you can dial in how much or how little of those intermediate support structures you want and then let's have a look what we've got we've got some cables so you can set how many cables you want um we can tweak the spread of them a little bit and we've also got a multiplier on the thickness as well so plenty of parameters to get like a a varied look we've also got this cable sag effect going on as well that we can dial in so we can really push it to the extreme and have sort of a messy um messy look to it or we could zero that out and have if you were working with metal pipes or pipes that you that you you want it to look quite tidy in addition to that we've got some vertex color as well which will drive a shader in unreal engine and this is just a simple um color ramp so you can specify individual colors and you can see them updating in the viewport there as we slide they're just picked at random so you can again this is another element that you can sort of randomize and sort of create a different look so that's the the asset in houdini like i said super super simple um but i think it fulfills the the brief of um automating a boring modeling task quite well so let's jump over to uh unreal engine and we can instantiate an instance of that at the origin and there you go you can see we're into our build mode there so if i select the the spline actor we can select these nodes here and if we hold down alt we can draw out our conduit pattern okay and then if we come out of build mode it will uh it will build and there you can see it's picking up the the correct uh material assignments as well so we've got this sort of mesh effect on the um on the underside tray there and we can use all the same parameters that were present in uh in houdini so we've got all the different number of cables the amount of sag we've got on the cables all present in in houdini engine and you know to populate a level would be just a matter of you know just dropping another instance in there and then just tweaking the positions and you know set the values and things like that so you can very very quickly populate your level with um with boring assets with boring cable trays um it was a lot of fun to make and um yeah so that is my uh that is my cable tray asset um please feel free to comment uh i'm on the forums on the side effects tack art challenge bit so come and say hello any feedback i'd love to hear it so yeah thank you very much

Channel: Rick Banks

Views: 550

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: DSXQD2p5Rto

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021