Water Tower Designer

Demos and projects
1

Hi Everyone,

I work for a Civil Engineering company and have been working on a Water Tower Configurator as a tool to help our designers create proposals.
The features allow you to choose from a list of Water Tower styles, choose a color, choose a pre-made design, upload a custom design, upload a custom logo, and add a background. When finished, the designer is able to download a PDF of the mock up.
So far, it has been in Proof of Concept land. If you have any ideas on how to improve the user experience, enhance functionality, and bring this to Version 2.0, I would love to hear it!

https://www.bolton-menk.com/interactive/webgl/water-tower/index.html

Thank you kindly,
David E.

3 Likes
2

Hello :slight_smile:

I like this kind of project because in my previous company I worked in procedural generation (using Houdini :heart: ), basically my job was to create a full world (surrounding of highways, in Europe & USA) from a single command line in Linux. Including Highways (and its multiple kinds of connections, lines and lanes), highway tools, fences, bridges, buildings, houses, factories, etc, etc… Basically anything you can see while you are driving. And it was including Water Towers, of course ! :grin: So I basically spent hours already, working on a procedural generator of Water Tower. Shape, number of poles, lader accesses, pipes, etc, etc… Reminds me some nice memories :stuck_out_tongue:

So, I gave it a try, first of all, good job, it works like a charm ! UI is very neat and clean, everything works. Some possible enhancement :

Legged_Template
Legged_Template2048Ă—2048 356 KB

I edited the template like so, so that I could check the UV mapping.
I think that you should make so that no pixel from the template is “thrown away”. Meanning that for example on the Top and Bottom templates, you could provide circular shaped areas, UV mapped pixel perfect, so that a designer could actually work on some seamless design from Top to Bottom.
tower
tower922Ă—423 201 KB

Here for example most of corners for Top and Bottom are totally out

About the background I would add a checkbox to say either or not the uploaded background is a Equirectangular, or just a Photoshot (In my case I thought is was a panorama, and result was weird :smiley: )

Screenshot from 2024-04-29 16-46-25
Screenshot from 2024-04-29 16-46-251039Ă—655 40.4 KB

Those are minor details of course. Main aspect looks great :+1:

++
Tricotou

PS : Have a look at this video or this video, maybe it will give some inspiration :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
3

@Tricotou Thank you for taking a look at the water tower designer and offering feedback. Your previous experience generating procedural open-worlds with Houdini is quite impressive!

I agree with your comment on no wasted pixels for the UV Map template. Your mockup does a really nice job of optimizing the whole space. I will definitely revisit the UV Map for version 2. I’ve also been playing around with the background image element a bit. You have a good idea adding a checkbox to swap out the image type since one size won’t work for all of the possible image sizes and shapes. I think adding a few options for the user to work with will help quite a bit.

Your videos of the water tower generators are really cool! I would definitely benefit from functionality like that, there are so many other water tower options and designs that the 4 I have built in. Having a water tower builder would take this to the next level!

Thank you again for looking at my demo and giving feedback, I appreciate it!

-David