A Quick and Easy Way to Generate Cities in Houdini

The setup requires only two nodes.

Freelance Illustrator Ben Voldman has recently demonstrated a quick and convenient way of turning real-life large-scale cities into 3D models using Houdini's geometry nodes and map data taken from MapBox, a website that provides methods to browse and download data in a variety of formats.

Utilizing just two nodes, Labs MapBox, which allows you to generate color, height, and Open Street Map (OSM) curves using data from the aforementioned website, and Labs OSM Buildings, required to generate buildings from OSM data, the creator managed to recreate the entirety of New York City's Manhattan borough in 3D.

And here's the project the map was used for:

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Comments 1

  • Anonymous user

    Y'all should mention the buildings still need to be replaced with actual building instances since this just gives you basic block shapes for the buildings. Good for mograph/sky shots but anything near street level needs some more Houdini point/instance rangling.

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·a year ago·

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