Rows of houses

Our residential building tool enables the creation of residential plots and automatically places the optimal positions for residential buildings within these plots. First of all: We have deliberately decided against modular residential buildings and in favor of static residential building meshes. This gives our designer maximum freedom when designing the buildings and ensures a high degree of variability and a varied look in the final streets. However, the modular construction method will continue to accompany us intensively elsewhere.

Stand-alone neighboring houses without a continuous front line

In order to create a continuous house front from these individual meshes, the spaces between the buildings must be filled with walls and roofs. It should be noted that the buildings can be placed at any distance and angle to each other, which makes the number of possible constellations seem almost unlimited. To structure this complex task, we divide it into several steps:

1. a front wall must be created between the front corners of neighboring buildings that face the street.

2. a rear wall must be placed between the rear corners facing the backyard.

3. both walls must then be covered with matching roof pieces.

On closer inspection, there are only two basic scenarios: Either the front wall or the back wall is the shorter one. If we develop a solution for one of these scenarios, it can easily be transferred to the other.

Both possible scenarios for generating the front line

A further simplification results if both wall sections are laid parallel: The shorter wall section can simply be copied, offset parallel and placed along the line of the longer wall section. This method considerably simplifies the calculation of both the walls and the roof sections, as all the necessary operations can be carried out in rectangular or square areas.

In the next step, the remaining open areas of the longer wall are calculated and the resulting sloping roof sections are derived.

For the actual design of the wall and roof courses, we rely specifically on a modular construction method. As the row of houses algorithm will shape the appearance of the city in many places, an automated and random filling of the walls is a great advantage. We achieve this by using templates that are uniform in size but diverse in their design - for example through variations in windows, doors or ornaments.

For our purposes, it is sufficient to randomly fill wall pieces with these templates and scale them slightly if necessary to cover exactly the required length. We apply the same principle to the roof pieces.

An important performance aspect: All modular wall and roof templates are not spawned as separate actors in the world. Instead, we add them as entries in an Instanced Static Mesh Component. This significantly reduces the number of drawcalls and ensures better performance.

Houses with a continuous front line