Hi, I’m evaluating different approaches (Houdini, Unreal Blueprint, Apparance) to realize “semi procedural” generation of buildings etc.
is it possible to realize the following idea with Apparance?
The Artist creates a template (simple house blockout with wall modules etc.) FBX with named meshes OR a Blueprint with different placed meshes like “wall” or “door”
use this so called template as input for a Procedure
iterate through these sub meshes
compare name of the sub mesh if it’s a wall or anything else
place a variant per sub mesh at the origin of the template module and replace the template mesh
Good question.
The only part of this you’d have to build yourself is turning a template/model/etc into a list of ‘what to put where’ and then passing that to Apparance. Within Apparance you could iterate through the input data, placing objects (from looking them up in one or more Resource Lists) and variations of them.
As the templates are likely to be static you could process each into a simple text or binary format of data file and have Apparance read that (probably simpler than passing loads of parameters in). There are experimental Operators under the File and Data categories for reading data. These were used both in the Xml driven room creation project and the compiled OSM binary feeding the NYC project.
I hope that helps, happy to answer more questions or discuss the idea further.
Sam