So what is this project about?

This blog should be a silent witness (unless you guys drop down a few lines, which would be really great) of my struggle with development of a plug-in into 3D content creation suite Blender.

FAID is a procedural content generation tool employing shape grammars and its core is  based on Peter Wonka's paper.

Three main features of FAID should be:

• to facilitate automatic generation of high detail (maybe high polygon would be more honest:-)) 3D models of architecture objects like castles, houses, towers, walls, bridges, aqueducts, etc. (simply speaking - medieval fashioned stuff composed of walls and ogives)
• to allow regeneration of whole parts of building such as resize all windows on single side of structure or switch from using stones to bricks or change the hight of a single floor and so on by simply selecting desired items in a hierarchy tree and changing relevant attributes. 
• add some final touches achievable only by designers or artists such as breaking some windows  or painting some really juicy wall writing (like Romanes eunt domus)

How should FAID work?

1. in blender simply create bounding volume object (like cube) to define basic dimensions of building and its place in scene
2. fill basic attributes like a type of building or a side where an entrance should be
3. based on data provided in previous steps, the tool will generate the basic string for shape grammar (along with shape attributes - size, place, etc) 
4. perform derivation of string created in step 3 during which a model is created and its key elements are accessible from a tree like menu for further refinement
5. edit grammar rules and go back to any of previous steps (FAID comes with set of rules but its main power is in writing new rules doing exactly what you want)

Sources:

• Procedural Modeling of Buildings - Peter Wonka - a paper on which FAID is based on
• Procedural World - really great blog (about Following one man's task of building a virtual world from the comfort of his pajamas). The aim of this project is to create a tool called voxel studio which will be capable of creating a whole and amazingly detailed world.
• procedural architecture, voxel studio
• Opposite from voxel studio FAID's aim is to aid with creation of building structures only.
• Masonry plug-in nice plug-in for blender helping with creation of complex stone structures from simple ones. 
• Unlike this tool FAID's goal is to provide possibility to generate a complex structure and then refine its elements at will.

In next article I'm going to

• explain what FAID will be capable of and what would be nice to have
• explain why I think it's a good idea to write a blender plug-in
• describe current state of work

So I hope this is the beginning of a long series of articles on which end there will be a pretty awesome medieval kingdom.

A few unpolished renders from current prototype.

Simple building

Simple tower  - different windows

Simple tower - detail