Wait, what’s this?

Is it possibly the nightscape workflow that I promised but never delivered on in the first version?  I think it might be.  Still leagues from perfect, but so far so good!

nightscape test 01

Approximately Proxy

Added new feature — now you can generate a low poly proxy (152 quads, compared to 70,000 for the full mesh)

You will eventually be able to toggle between the visibility of the proxy and the high-poly version, so you can place your buildings before render time, add a command as a pre-render MEL script, and the system will switch all of them out for the render.

proxy example

proxy example wireframe

Vertically Challenged

New feature — I’m dubbing them “verticals” — sort of exterior columns between the windows.  They make for some fine, imposing structures.

testing verticals on cylindrical footprints

from the left: verticals, verticals with ledges, ledges only

rounder than what?

Just added this — I’m calling them “rounders” – they fill in sharp angles with a semi-cylindrical mesh.

 

with rounders

without rounders

It’s railing, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring…

Just about broke myself today trying some new-fangled approach for smaller, non-skyscraper style buildings. It failed pretty miserably, but I’m going to try again. I think I’m onto a good idea, but translating it into something that MEL can work with… well, that’s not so easy. In the meantime, I’ve added in a bit of code for creating railings in the gaps between building tiers.

railings test

Maya and extrusions

I’m sure everyone’s run into this problem before… Maya doesn’t really have a feature for creating “nice” extrusions the way many other packages do.  There are a couple Python-based  plugin solutions out there, but for KludgeCity, I had to figure out a pure MEL way to get the same kind of result.  The “fixed” extrusion tool I’ve come up with is a bit slow, but it works for almost every situation I’ve needed it for so far.  This will allow me to UV entire buildings at a time, instead of the piecemeal floor-by-floor approach I’ve been going with.  For now, it’s got a pretty narrow scope of usefulness, but I’ll probably try to expand it so that it will be an all-purpose tool.

Original Extrude

Fixed Extrusion

Tiers before fears

Testing the new tier system.  You can now get a huge amount of variety from the same base footprint.

four buildings from the same base footprint

still adding detail passes

Who’s Kludging Now?

I occasionally get feedback from people who use Kludge, sometimes in the form of donations, sometimes just a friendly email.  So I’d like to say a warm thank you to the following folks:

Sara in Angola

Raphael in South Africa

Ruslan in Karaganda, Kazakhstan

Sergey in Moscow, Russia

Ranaldo in Washington State, USA

Lee in Georgia, USA

Pamela in Colorado, USA

Jose in New York, USA

Paul in Michigan, USA

Brian in California, USA

 

The Journey so far…

kludge 0.1.7

footprint stress test

Kludge 0.1.4

kludge 0.1.2

kludge 0.1.5

kludge 0.1.6

kludge 0.1.3