Building the thing that builds the buildings

I wrote before about debugging tools. Not just to build them, but how in an ai-native workflow you need to be thinking more about “build the thing that builds the thing”. It’s not something that’s instinctual for people. We’re taught in school to just solve the damn problem, get a grade, and then maybe you’ll get a chance at recess.

Building the thing that builds the thing can take many forms. It can look like debugging tools. It can look like ways to interpret the project you’re working on. In the case of this article I have pictures of a procedural building system. It’s not just a building. It’s a full procedural system that builds the exterior, interior and even a few furniture pieces. It’s how I’m getting so much variety in my scenes.

A lot of workflows look like a one-shot of I’ll build a scene and put things in it. This is ok, and it certainly works. However, imagine the power that you’d have if you built a procedural system that built the things, and then you put that procedural system into the scene? Massive variety unlocked and you don’t even need custom 3d models to get there. Turns out the SOTA models (Codex, Fable, Mythos) are all more than capable of getting you there.

In fact, you can take a procedural building system and do things like “build a decal system so the interior can have signage” and then turn the model loose on building exactly that. And then with pure delight you’ll discover alternative fiction posters, of events that don’t exist, and so much more-all awaiting discovery inside the buildings.

Consider this “The Empire: Steel Wheel TRACTOR” poster that appears in one such building. I didn’t ask for this explicitly. I discovered it while navigating a building.

The builder tools become like music loops over time. I find you can remix them and pull them around different projects. It’s a lot like other creative endeavors. It’s possible to mix and remix things, and with AI that’s especially true.

One of the other interesting features of these tools is improvements to the first-person-camera perspective. Somewhere along the way while working out how to port EverQuest to typescript, I added the ability to do interactions. This creates for very immersive situations, such as this building directory the model created.

And checking normals, and such, too.

And as neat as all that is, there are still surprising times. For example, this is a constructed universe scene that the model is working thru to build. It’s gone down a path, but I’ve opted to not stop it or course correct it. The reason I haven’t is because the scene is so weird that I’m curious where the model is going with this. It’s like a strange fusion of lots of different things and I haven’t quite figured out what the angle is here.

So next time you do a project, or if you have one now, take a minute to reflect on what things appear with regularity in your project. That might be a sign you have an opportunity to build the thing that builds the thing.