Mystic Towers – Procedural Modelling (+Patreon)

“Mystic Towers” is originally a personal environment work to dig more into procedurale systems.

Only houdini could let me achieve such an intricate architecture while maintenant a non destructive/procedural workflow.

You might recognize these towers from the Mahabat-Maqbara palace in India, a beautiful piece of architecture with multiple influences such as neo-gothic, indian, islamic… I Wanted to convey an older and taller vibe than the originals, like if these high towers where only visited by birds.

Final illustration:
I learned a lot while making it so I created an in depth tutorial series about the procedural setup of these towers.

part 1: Main setup
In this first video we are setting up the fundamental elements of the tower : wall, doors, stairs, railling.

part 2: Polishing shapes
The seoncd part focus on finishing the lower section of the tower.

part 3: Dome setup
Time to work on the dome, the column of the tower !

RENDERING THE TOWER
For the rendering of this project I really wanted to try VRay for Houdini.

I have been using this engine in production for years with 3dsmax, Maya… but was very curious to check out how things goes with Houdini.

I must say I have been very surprised by the versatility of VRay for Houdini and at the same time it seemed totaly familiar with what I knew.

I didn’t do any tutorials about the lighting and shading of this project as I ran out of time. But still took the opportunity to do few tutorials about this engine. Including one using this project to show Vray’s render element which I found really convenient as you can setup your different aovs using nodal system.