I’m very excited to announce that after 4 years, Brickini is finally available for everyone! 🎉 I know many have been asking for it – I’m sorry it took so long – but work and other live duties always got in the way.
I made a new promotional video, showcasing all the cool things that Brickini is now capable of. It has grown a lot in these last couple of years. Besides all the bells and whistles, I was also able to make Brickini blazing fast! The small landscapes from my old showcase video were actually pretty painful to generate – easily half an hour for a couple of thousand bricks. But I’m happy to say that it’s now possible to generate huuuge landscapes thanks to some VEX optimizations. Some stats:
| Type | Bricks Amount | Computation Time |
|---|---|---|
| Simple brickification – bricks only | 521 | 0.23 sec |
| Complex brickification – bricks, slopes, plates | 538 | 0.74 sec |
| Simple brickification – bricks only | 5K | 0.68 sec |
| Complex brickification – bricks, slopes, plates | 5K | 1.67 sec |
| Simple brickification – bricks only | 100K | 8.63 sec |
| Complex brickification – bricks, slopes, plates | 100K | 13.52 sec |
| Simple brickification – bricks only | 500K | 40.71 sec |
| Complex brickification – bricks, slopes, plates | 250K | 1:54.39 min |
For anything up to a couple thousand bricks, Brickini can be used interactively with almost realtime-ish performance. When I say realtime, obviously I’m talking about the VFX definition of “realtime” where we usually measure everything in minutes and hours and not video game realtime where we measure things in fractions of seconds smile
But even for huge builds with half a million bricks you won’t have to wait too long. For the last benchmark test, there was a lot of memory paging going on, so if you’ve got more memory than I do, things should be a bit faster.
It also seems that the VDB and assemble nodes inside Brickini Brickify consume a large chunk of computation time. Since they are multithreaded, this time should be much shorter if your CPU got more cores. However, unfortunately this also means, that even if I would manage to improve my VEX (attribwrangles) further, I would still be bottlenecked by all those VDB related nodes.
Brickini Vending Machine
Part of the secret sauce of Brickini is the Vending Machine. It procedurally generates bricks that are then instanced onto the points generated by the Brickify engine. To be completely honest with you – this was absolutely not necessary. I could have just modeled the bricks traditionally and would have probably completed the task in half the time. But then I wouldn’t have been able to do this cool procedural modeling flex video…
To be fair, there is one real use case for the procedural approach: I was able to easily build LOD controls. If you’ve got huge landscapes in the background of a scene, you can quickly turn off the interior detail and reduce the sides of the studs to save a huge amount of polygons. I suppose that’s a valid enough reason for me going through the pain of building this brick generator smile
Brickini X LDraw2Houdini
Brickini can be used on its own, however it really spreads its wings if combined with LDraw2Houdini. LDraw2Houdini lets you import LDraw files into Houdini and best of all – I open sourced it smile
For example, LDraw2Houdini comes with a Brickini Imperfection node to make your brickified builds look more natural by stacking bricks with tiny random offsets. Furthermore, the Brickini Karma Material not only supports LDraw bricks and models, but also Brickini Brickify models. A match made in heaven.
Brickini Website
I created a new dedicated website which contains in-depth information and documentation to get you started. Feel free to check it out here:
How to get Brickini
You can follow the link below to get your hands on Brickini. They are Houdini Indie license (*.hdalc) files. If you need a full commercial license, don’t hesitate to contact me directly!
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