C++ Maya Plugins and MEL
Building Building Builder
Procedural Generation of Urban Buildings
The goal of this project was to design an architecture development tool which allows the user to quickly generate realistic buildings and also gives the user control over finer detail modifications of the building. This tool provides a technical artist the power to generate complex architecture fairly quickly and also provides an interface needed to make minute modifications of the procedurally generated buildings. The tool provides an interface that gives the artist the ability to first generate the base floor plan of the building. Next, the artist is given a graphical user interface that allows him/her to specify the number of floors, the number of windows per floor, and the type of windows and doors he/she would like on the building. Along with providing a set of pre-modeled windows and entry-ways, the user is also able to create his/her own models that can be used in the overall procedural generation of a building.
Authoring Tool Functional Flow Chart
The tool was developed as a Maya plug-in using both the C++ Maya API and MEL scripting. Implementation of the procedural building generation tool is based on the paper Interactive Visual Editing of Grammars for Procedural Architecture [Lipp, Wonka and Wimmer 2008]. The tool was developed in different phases over a span of 8 weeks. The first few weeks was dedicated to designing the graphical user interface and figuring out the MEL commands needed to generate and position the various pieces of the building. Along with this process, the coding for the node objects of the building and the procedures that manipulate these nodes was written. The rest of the time went into interfacing the backend data generated by the C++ objects to the graphical user interface and the MEL commands needed to graphically generate the buildings. This final process included both debugging the tool and testing it. |
