Pagoda Making Tool

This project started when I decided to model a single pagoda in Houdini, and eventually became a full blown pagoda making tool (I just got too excited and ended up totally going down the pagoda rabbit hole haha). 

I wanted to create a tool that enabled an artist to create a wide variety of pagodas (theoretically so that they could hit match reference they were given).  To do this, I created a menu with different tabs corresponding to different parts of the pagoda. Each part has broad controls (like number of sides for the pagoda, the type of walls the pagoda has, or the overall profile of the roof) as well as expandable menus with finer controls (like how many tiles to place on the roof or what the pillar bases should look like).

A few details about this project that I’m very proud of are

• The ability to create pagodas with arbitrary amounts of unique layers

• The procedural decorative wood paneling option for the walls

• Custom viewer handles for changing the roof profile

The trickiest part of this project was creating the multiparm interface for adding arbitrary amounts of layers which can all be individually tuned. Because Houdini multiparm menus don’t have a built in way to duplicate  layers, I dove into Python scripting in Houdini (for my first time!) to implement a way for users to save and load layers. 

To the right is a sped up demo of me creating a pagoda with my tool, and below are some of the pagodas I created using my tool.