Self Evaluation

It's time for some introspective self-evaluation.

Looking back on my initial proposal, I realized that starting out, my goals weren't very clear. There are two types of procedural generation when creating a city—the generation of the individual building, and the generation of the whole city from many buildings. At first I had planned to tackle both these problems, but combined with a rather steep learning curve for MEL, this proved to be a bit too ambitious. It's fair to say that I underestimated how long it would take to really understand how MEL worked and how to manipulate objects through MEL effectively. After getting feedback from my Alpha Review, I stepped back and reevaluated my project. This led to a change in direction that I feel was ultimately a positive turn for my project. I decided to focus on the generation of a whole city, since it allowed for more artistic experimentation (generating the different building types), as well as a more practical final product.

While my current project is fairly different than what I had originally envisioned, I'm quite happy at how it turned out. Here is a list of features I have today:

• Ability to generate buildings from either faces or polygons
• Established framework for adding additional types of buildings
• Generation of different building types depending on face color
• 3 different types of assets: residential, business, trees
• Ability to import additional assets as Maya ASCII files
• Setting max/min height of generated buildings (currently hard-coded)
• Setting cell width of building windows (currently hard-coded)
• Generation of random types of roots/details on buildings

Please see my previous post for features I'm planning on implementing the next few weeks. Eventually I'm hoping to create a script that's easily extensible so users can have more control over what types of assets are generated (ie. a backyard with different types of plants instead of being limited to a city)