Why do we need a wall? The goal is to procedurally generate tabletop wargames terrain. To make a building, we will need at least a few walls and a roof. A wall is a big enough chunk that we can generate variety and it's not too big to be intimidating.
The very simplest wall is just a box of specified width, length and height. But that would be dull. We're going to want to at least have some decorative pattern on the surface and for more practical uses, windows and doors.
So let's take a page from the modular book and create a number of partial wall segments, some with windows, some with doors, and some solid sections with different details. Then we can use a procedural algorithm to mix them and modify them to make a wall of the desired length.
What's the difference between printing out a number of modular segments and an algorithm that merges these segments into one wall?
Firstly, the algorithm can create any length of wall, not just multiples of the modular pieces.
Secondly, we can hide the seams and create a stronger, single wall.
Thirdly, we can add far more virtual variety that can be combined and printed as unique pieces, with a lot more detail than we can achieve by combining separate physical segments.
Finally, once we start combining multiple walls into full buildings, we can do things you would never be able to do with physical modular pieces.
But first, we have to build a wall.
No comments:
Post a Comment