Game programming tools like Unity let technical artists articulate increasingly sophisticated visions, without specialized knowledge of the underlying platform.

2022 Feb 1 Dustin Getz https://twitter.com/dustingetz

This is Houdini, a “procedural animation” plugin for Unity that is used by technical artists to model complex animations like a building crumbling:

“Procedural animation” means the animation is decomposed into a procedure or series of logical steps. This procedure to model a crumbling building is roughly:

• start with a square geometry at coordinates XYZ with metadata ABC
• repeat and extrude the square into a tall block; further carve and transform it into a building
• apply a “material fracture” algorithm to fracture the model
• apply a “bullet solver” algorithm to simulate the crumbling of the fractured model under gravity

Each step pipes its output geometry into the next step, along with rich metadata (fixed parameters configuring the transform) which are set using the property editor (top right).

The building geometry itself is composed recursively of component models.

Procedural artists don’t just deliver a finished static result (like a painting), the procedure itself is a key deliverable. The procedure itself enables two things:

1. animation – to script complex motions, the model needs to specify all the individual components and their relations for fine-grained control.
2. reuse – the model can be reused across multiple instances with different parameter configurations. In this way a single artist can quickly spin up an entire city without modeling each individual building.