Wisconsin Historical Building
By Kieran Radley
1/30/2022
Houdini Version 19.0.455
About the Building
My building, located at 300 Dousman St, Green Bay, Wisconsin 54303, is a small office building built in 1908, created under the Astylistic Utilitarian architecture style. This building has a long history of ownership. It started out as the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad freight office. After that, it was owned by The Larsen Company, who specialized in their “Freshlike” canned vegetables. Currently, this building is owned by Vincent Urban Walker & Associates, an insurance firm.
Important Statistics
Rendered with Mantra
Average Render Time: 1.9 min/frame
Total Render Time: 11.3 hours
Resolution: 1280x720
Samples
Min Ray Samples: 1
Max Ray Samples: 9
Global Quality: 2
Diffuse Quality: 1
Reflection Quality: 1
Light Sampling Quality: 2
Noise Level: 0.01
Lights in Scene: 1 sun keylight & 1 sun fill light
User Manual
The user of this hipnc will control most attributes of this building through parameter control sliders. These controls are located in the top level geometry shell titled “geoBuilding”
Controls - 15 Total
1. Banner: Changes the banner on the front and side of the building between 5 different options.
2. Width: Controls the size of the building along the X axis. Generates new windows.
3. Depth: Controls the size of the building along the Z axis. Generates new windows.
4. Height: Controls the size of the building along the Y axis. Generates new stories of a certain size.
5. Story Size: Increases the size of the stories.
6. Back Portion Height: Controls the proportional size of the posterior section of the house. In the reference, it was about half the size of the anterior section.
7. Roof Thickness: Controls the thickness of the top extruded ledge of the roof.
8. Roof Height: Controls the height of the roof itself.
9. Roof Offset: Controls how extruded the roof is, away from the center of the building.
10. Chimney Height: Controls the height of the chimney. It’s able to retract completely inside the building.
11. Chimney Width: Increases or decreases the width of the chimney. The X and Z axes of the chimney remain a fixed 1:1 ratio.
12. Chimney Offset: Controls the size of the top concrete lip of the chimney.
13. Window Separation: Controls the X and Z distance of the windows to each other. Pushing them too close to the edges of the building will despawn the window.
14. GF Window Height: GF stands for “Ground Floor.” This controls the height of the ground floor windows.
15. 2+ Window Height: This controls the height of the windows from the second floor beyond.
Technical Guide
All of the nodes are within groups with sticky notes inside the “geoBuilding” top level geometry shell. The groups are color coded and arranged very roughly in the way the house itself is arranged. The group for the 2+ floors is directly above the group for the ground floor. The door and door frame group is under the windows group, and the windows group is under the roof group.
This building is made up of several major groups making up the pieces of the house. These include the ground floor (brown), the door (red), the windows (blue), window holes (dark gray), the upper floors (yellow), the roof (beige), the back portion (light gray), and the banner (green). The structure is rife with boolean operations. There are many nodes in this network with multiple connections, so be wary when changing one, as there may be a chain reaction. The final building is summoned by the single node next to the green sticky note. The three bottommost nodes are responsible for the turntable animation, if that effect is desired.
Challenges and Thoughts
Creating this building was like a fun puzzle that really took some experimentation to get right. I’m very proud of the progress I have made with this project, as the Houdini interface has become more and more familiar to me, and I’ve learned to work faster and more efficiently through the process. The largest challenge for me was the organization of my nodes. When I added more and more necessary nodes, the network quickly became messy. I had to deal with crossed connections that led from one side of the network to the other, oftentimes disconnecting them by mistake.
Beyond the Requirements
What I did to push my project past the requirements is added an extra special parameter- the Banner slider. The two banners located on the front and left faces of the building can swap between 5 different looks using this slider.
Each of these signs is actually a sign that could realistically be seen on this building! The Chicago Northwestern Railroad were the first owners of the place 1908, followed by the Larsen Canning Co. from 1926 to 2009. Vincent Urban Walker & Associates are the current owners of the office building on 300 Dousman St. It’s located in Green Bay, so the flag of Green Bay is included. Finally, there is an ad for a vacant building. This is actually taken from a similar office building located in downtown Green Bay!
These different looks were formatted by me in Photoshop to be the same dimensions, using some texturing skills I’ve learned from another class. The implementation of this integer slider used a cheeky override of the texture parameter, and I set the last number of the file name to be selected by the banner slider. As you can see by the file names I chose, this worked out like a charm!
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