Free procedural building generator: Building Generator v.01

[ivanisavich]

Do you have plans of creating a small tutorial, guide or something? I’m a little overwhelmed by all the features and really don’t know where to start.

In the future, yes.

For now, to get started, load the script and press generate

[ivanisavich]

Hi Tyson!

Your srcipt is really great.

I have one question…will you add full support to Arch&Design Material(Mental Ray)?.

Cheers.

Wasn’t planning on it, no.

The Arch & Design material has too many settings to try and implement into my UI for any reasonable level of control. Your best bet is to just to load up the materials made by building generator and replace what you want with Arch & Design materials.

Maybe in the future I will add a ‘custom material’ option, where you can just grab a material of your choice from the material editor, to be applied to any mat ID of your choosing. I’d have to figure out how to deal with materials that have strange naming conventions though. That’s the problem right now with custom materials + my script. How can I figure out where to assign bump/spec/reflection/diffuse maps when each material has different naming conventions for those slots and some materials don’t have those slots at all? Maybe I’ll work on that for a future release at some point.

EDIT: scratch all of the above. Just found the maxscript function that returns the names of all the map slots for any given material type. This means I can do things like allow users to add custom materials, while still assigning random textures to channels like diffuse/bump/etc through the generation process. So, the next version of building generator is going to have this custom material option

[joconnell]

Drat! Must have grabbed the wrong link - I assumed 0.55 was a later version than 0.52 so went along with it - good that it’s stupidity on my part then

[ivanisavich]

Drat! Must have grabbed the wrong link - I assumed 0.55 was a later version than 0.52 so went along with it - good that it’s stupidity on my part then

“v05_50” means the 50th revision of v0.5

“v052_02” means the 2nd revision of v0.52

[ivanisavich]

Hi Tyson!

Your srcipt is really great.

I have one question…will you add full support to Arch&Design Material(Mental Ray)?.

Cheers.

Verbal update:

The next version which will be coming out soon (v.6) now supports all material types.

You can setup the custom material however you want in the material editor, and once you’re ready to generate, building generator will grab the material you setup, and throw in randomized texture maps into any of the available slots that you choose. So, you could setup a full Arch&Design material complete with texture maps that you apply beforehand, and just have building generator throw a randomized map in the diffuse slot from the list of texture maps you’ve selected in the texture settings. Or, none at all if you select none of the available slots in the list, etc.

Here’s a view of what the controls for custom materials look like…very simple, because all the tweaking of the material can be done in the material editor:

[SLI]

This is insanity. You MUST at least provide a paypal link on your site for donations!!

[TuroT]

Hi Tyson, excellent script i am playing a lot with it.
I have a couple of questions.
Can I make the ledges like the two colors building? the first 2 floors a ledge then another floor a ledge and then 9 floors and another ledge.
Can I make taper only in top floors?
Thanks in advance.
P.D.: Sorry for my English.

[ivanisavich]

This is insanity. You MUST at least provide a paypal link on your site for donations!!

Nah, I think I’ll hold off on that type of thing for now…

Maybe put the money towards your favorite charity instead

Hi Tyson, excellent script i am playing a lot with it.
I have a couple of questions.
Can I make the ledges like the two colors building? the first 2 floors a ledge then another floor a ledge and then 9 floors and another ledge.
Can I make taper only in top floors?
Thanks in advance.
P.D.: Sorry for my English.

Hey TuroT,

A new “floor manager” is being added to the next version, that allows for per-floor control of wall height, wall taper, bevel and ledge options. So…you’ll be able to control exactly which layers of the building you can taper with the next version coming out.

As for the way that the building’s layers are colored differently, right now there’s no way to control that. Maybe in the future I’ll add an option to do that.

The main reason I don’t have that type of thing now, is because I don’t want the procedurally-generated multi-sub material that Building Generator makes for buildings to be unmanageable. There’s already 29 slots being used for all the different material types…adding something like per-floor color control would make that number a lot bigger, which is probably not a good thing.

[Osiris9650]

This is insanity. You MUST at least provide a paypal link on your site for donations!!

The crazy thing is, he doesn’t want it! I offered in a private email and he said no then too. Tyson really needs to get some kind of an award or recognition for this. All of this very skillful work provided free of charge for the advancement of the arts - that is rare indeed.

This is more feature filled, user friendly, and useful than most plugins. Seriously, it makes a lot of the (very expensive) Evermotion Archexterior/Archmodels unnecessary.

Thanks again Tyson!!!

[ivanisavich]

Thanks for the encouragement David!

Another verbal update.

Controls have been added for per-floor control of ledges (you can disable or enable ledges for any floor(s) you want)…taper (you can set scake for any floor(s), and set the scale amount per axis)…and corner controls (bevel/inverted corner/ledge contour controls for any floor of your choice)

[leckter]

Nah, I think I’ll hold off on that type of thing for now…

Maybe put the money towards your favorite charity instead

:bowdown::bowdown::bowdown::bowdown::bowdown:

Insane, wonderful.

[smvwhite]

When I first saw the photo posted by TuroT I thought that this was a Building Generator render. No doubt a scene like this will be possible very soon (the two colour building would only need the two colours in the texture applied).

Amazing work!

[JamesBrett]

what a star! having a lot of fun with this would be cool to see a quick youtube tutorial going over the all the new functions and what effect they have.

[Clappy3D]

Hey Tyson,

First off, thanks for your time and generosity. The tool is great.

What would be truly amazing for us non-arch viz guys would be the ability to use this as a modifier on custom shapes. Would be an awesome tool for environment design.

Also, having some stone and brick features for castles. Castle generator has a nice ring to it.

Just some suggestions.

Thanks again.

Matt

[simonenastasi]

Hi Tyson,
first, thanks a ton!
second, sorry for the stupid question, but I don’t see this script listed anywhere when trying to customize a toolbar in order to fire up the script pressing a button. Any help?
thanks!

[guest01]

hey Tyson
thanks for your tutorials at your site
very usefull

[CGButler]

Hi ivanisavich

I’ve only stumbled across this script today and as I am a 3D visualiser by trade, your script, might actually be the most used by me from now on! I never thought there would be such a script, it’s amazing!! I’ve just read through the pages on this post and was wondering one thing…

How can i create a button in max that will run this script. Normally I open a script, select all the code and drag it on to a toolbar. But because your is encrypted, this won’t work. Is there a way i can get it in to a max button? So I don’t have to Run the script every time i want to use it?

Looking forward to the surface options…any release date in mind??

Many thanks

Butler.

[ivanisavich]

Hey guys,

I wrote a macroscript that will allow you to assign the script to a hotkey or button. Just save the following code as a .ms file, put it in your plugins directory (so it loads each time max starts), then in the “customize user interface” options you can find it listed under “Building Generator”

Note: You’ll need to change the file path in the script to match where the building generator script is on your computer. Anywhere there’s a backslash in the path, make sure you add an extra one as well, like the way it’s shown in the script

 macroscript buildingGen category:"Building Generator" icon:#("standard",1)
 (	
 	file = "x:\\projects\\buildinggenerator\\scripts\\old\\buildingGen_v052_02.ms"
 	filein file
 )
 

As for ETA on next version, I’m hoping to get it out sometime on the weekend. It’s got a shitload of new features (some mentioned already in this thread, some a surprise) so it’ll be worth the wait

[CGButler]

You Sir,

Are a legend! Thanks for the code!

I’ve never been so excited about a script release!!

Cheers.

[CGButler]

ivanisavich

I’ve just found an error. It happens every time without fail!

1. Open the script
2. In the roof section untick Roof Wall
3. Tick Roof Type 2
4. Click generate

I get a MAXScript Rollout Handler Exception that says --Unkown property: “name” in undefined. Click ok and it creates a building with a flat top and all elements are ungrouped. Which is obviously not what i tried to create!

Something for you to ponder over!

Cheers.