Buildings

@voxolith/gen-building makes houses. A small shape grammar lays out the mass (a plinth, hollow storeys with floor slabs, a gable, hip or flat roof), then detail passes work over it at roughly 2.5 voxels to the foot, so a storey is about 24 voxels and a cottage sits in proportion beside a 190-voxel tree.

import { seededRandom } from "@voxolith/renderer/core";
import { generateBuilding, PRESETS } from "@voxolith/gen-building";

const { entity } = generateBuilding(PRESETS.farmhouse, seededRandom(42));
// rooms are hollow and closed; the front door faces +z

How it worksCopy Anchor Link

Everything random comes from the injected rng or from hashes of positions. shape and openings decide which voxels exist and look mostly decides which role each gets. The four wall styles and four roofings are separate from the geometry, and colours come from 32 roles (walls, mortar, trim, beams, glass, lit glass, frames, doors, shutters, roof tones, ridge, chimney, soot, pots, foundation, floor, moss, gutters, flowers and leaves), so a house restyles by palette. Four roles carry material hints: glass is glass, lit glass emits, and the handle and rainwater goods are metal.

PresetsCopy Anchor Link

Finer scalesCopy Anchor Link

At 20, 50 and 100 voxels per metre a building stays crisp (walls flat, corners sharp) and is refined on its outside faces only; the rooms are skipped. What the finer grid adds is masonry and joinery at their real size, which the coarse building can only suggest (its bricks are 80 cm long and its joints 10 cm wide): bricks in running bond with one-voxel joints set back, ashlar courses of blocks of varying length, fine plaster mottling, grain along timbers, tile, slate or shingle courses with a shadowed lower edge, streaky ragged thatch, boards on doors and shutters and planks on floors. The coarse building is generated without its relief first, since the joints are drawn at their own scale. At 20 voxels per metre (5 cm) a course or a slate row at real size would be under two voxels, so there the courses, tiles and boards have minimum sizes and come out at about twice their real size (at 20 voxels per metre). Door panels and handles are tied to their frames after refinement, so nothing on a door floats at any fine scale. Flowers and leaves are loose roles. See scales and refinement.

DevelopmentCopy Anchor Link

bun run --cwd generators/building verify            # connectivity, hollowness, openings, determinism, share codes
bun run --cwd generators/building preview species   # contact sheets into previews/ (also: roofs, walls, seeds, closeup)
bun run --cwd generators/building gen               # bake .vox files into out/

HouseCopy Anchor Link

voxolith/house starts from the cottage preset; every other preset is reachable through its parameters.

TownhouseCopy Anchor Link

voxolith/townhouse is the same generator starting from the townhouse preset, with the brick and slate skin as its default roles.

See the API reference for generateBuilding and the parameter types.