This will be a brief breakdown of my experiments with making a rough roof generator to be used at the grey-boxing stage of a game project I'm working on with my partner Maito Jobbe-Duval. She's an art director with an art and theatre background and has designed lots of spaces for the theatre company Punchdrunk. Our collaboration is, at this stage, intended as way for the two of us to expand our portfolio, she in Level design and Art Direction, me in Programming and Technical Art, and for the two of us to hopefully get a demo together to publish and have something out there in the world. More about the specifics of the game in future posts but for now, rooves, roofs, whatever...

The asset is designed to be used at the blockout/greyboxing stages in the Unreal Engine, a key scene in the game plays out on the rooftops and our game is top-down view so I thought it would be a good thing to have at this stage to do some rough play tests and to help generate some concept art.

Google streetview image reference.

Generating 'Hip-rooves' seems to be a bit better documented than generating the gable roof that is more prevalent in the architecture in our game. This resource "Procedural Venice" was great to read through. To some extent the gable roof is much simpler but I found a few challenges thrown up when trying to use irregular shaped building blocks and bevelled corners.

I started off using Blender and Geometry Nodes as I've really enjoyed using it recently on the project for Shezad Dawood. I had intended to use the Altermesh plugin for unreal after having a very brief experiment with it - and it does seem great - however I've switched to Houdini, mainly because it supports Unreal's brushes system and not just Static Meshes (like Altermesh), and we're keen to do the block out in Unreal as far as possible at this stage.

First I'm extracting the top-most plane of the cube

Then Finding the longest parallel-ish edges in order to disregard any bevelled edges, I say paralell-ish because I want this to work on none regular rectangular buildings as the game is set in a small village of which the folky unplanned architecture is a feature.

Then I'm adding a new plane, bisected along the apex and using the original "Top Plane" geo extruded and a boolean op to create this which will become the roof.

Then I'm extruding the apex of the roof based on the new geometry's proximity to the apex edge.

During my research for this I found this really cool node group from Blender Bash to inset faces which I then use to add some overhang to the roof.

In it's current iteration it has some limitations, none-parallel edges generate irregular none-flat roof planes and I'd also like to be able to offset the apex along it's opposite axis

It's a little tricky to negotiate the feature list of this, what is necessary and what is just a nice to have?

This is as far as I got with geometry nodes before switching to Houdini which I think makes sense to have in a separate post...

Hello World!

I've set up a profile and website here on Art Station.  Having not had much of a web presence until now I've decided it's time to sort it out. I have been a freelancer for a few years now and have managed to go from job to job pretty much on recommendation and through existing networks but this isn't something I want to rely on and won't necessarily push me in the direction I want to go.

The process of gathering things together for portfolio always forces one to reflect on what's there in new ways and it's not always comfortable. Of course some stuff stands up well and other stuff less well but also I find myself forced to confront how bitty my stuff is on one hand and how diverse it is on the other.  I don't feel I quite fit into the mould of the typical Art Station Artist which it seems is orientated towards game artists and illustrators, which have quite established conventions. I come from a fine-art background, coming to 3d via sculpture and installation - that world has it’s own set of conventions which I never felt comfortable with either. For years I’ve had the domain name gabrielstones.com and have mostly left it to rot - it has never felt like the right place to post work I’ve done for other artists or animations I’ve made for promo events and the like, nor have I had a personal brand to push as an artist in the art-world sense. So hopefully this will be a good place to share things I’ve made for myself and others.

Some projects I will publish on Art Station and some on just the website kind of on an ad-hoc basis depending on how appropriate it feels for each project, this is something I think I'll figure out as I start to use the site.

The blog feature of AS is something that attracted me, blogs might be a bit passé and I don't know how well used the AS blogosphere is but I thought it'd be good for me to try to keep up a blog for posting work in progress, devlog type stuff and maybe some random thoughts too. So here goes...

Geometry Nodes patch cable generator thing I made for the innards of a quantum computer as part of the development of Libby Heaney’s Ent project.