Heres something ive been working on for the last 2 weeks. Its kinda inspired by my time as a Layout Designer – I always wanted something to speed up my asset placement and allow me to iterate on a larger scale quickly. This attempts to address that by allowing you to model primitive geometry and then use it to guide the placement of modular assets. Rather than being confined to a grid and snapping geometry together, users are free to layout their scene however they like and worry about the modularity later.
Working in Maya I can still leverage all of the modeling tools, which makes this a bit easier to make modeling changes that another engine might not support. Its still pretty small but i could see this becoming a lot more complex depending on your use case. I think porting this to a game engine would be the long term goal, since i think a layout designer is more likely to use a tool like this than anyone.
In the future id like to better support attachments, support rebuilding the guide mesh and updating placed instances, and experiment with more organic shapes. Attachments would allow balconies and windows that don’t have to be fused to a wall, or applying game markup to all the instances at once. Rebuilding the guide mesh would allow designers to continue to iterate and update the instances as needed. And in terms of procedural layout, modern buildings are somewhat more straightforward than something more fantasy inspired. Since the grid is now shaped by the edgeflow of the geometry, more complex organic structures and changes could be achieved without sacrificing modularity