The Brute
A study on procedural generations of concrete structures.
Procedural sculptures.
I have long had a fascination with Brutalist architecture. It is rigid, imposing, and unique. Hard angles and flat planes of concrete seem to be a boring set of tools to work with when creating interesting spaces, but the artists of the movement managed to take those basic building blocks and create some truly inspiring spaces.
This self-initiated project was both an homage to Brutalist architecture and my first foray into procedurally generated structures. It is a quick exercise and distillation of what I search for most in my work - a technical challenge driven by a visual fascination. The following structures are all generated by my setup in Houdini, randomly and without intervention from me. Some generations were good, others less so, but by generating a series of hundreds of buildings, I could go through and select the best ones and create varied compositions of different colors, focal lengths, and environmental materials.
The setup.
The setup was fairly simple in concept - I modeled a variety of building blocks each 1 unit in length and width, and ranging in height from 1 to 4 units. After this was done, I scattered points constrained to a grid within a randomized piece of geometry. After that step, I removed a random amount of points from the resulting point cloud, opening up spaces and contributing another layer of variation. The next step involved writing a block of VEX code to look through the point cloud and calculate the vertical distance from each point to the point below it. This calculation was passed into an attribute that was used to scatter the previously modeled geometry pieces.
In summation.
This was my first time building a system to generate structures procedurally. Although the setup was very simple at its core, the generated models continually provided new zones of interest that blurred the line between creation and discovery. It was a wonderful feeling to be an explorer, provided with a large amount of source models, rotating, positioning, and creating compositions. In the years since I created this project, I have used similar setups to generate plants, buildings, characters, and more.
