For the first assessment, I plan to create a Tool Rack for my Smithy Environment. This asset will be an integral part of the scene in the next two assessments and should not require a lot of texturing or material work, so it is a good foundation for building my procedural modelling skills in Houdini. I plan to make the width, height, and amount of shelves customisable.

1. The first part of the asset I worked on was blocking out the rack stands, which was created by scaling and editing a cube.

2. After blocking out the stand I used a Copy To Points node with a horizontal line to test how multiple stands would look, as it would make sense to increase the amount of supporting stands as the width of the model increases.

3. I added a rod by scaling a cube, and made it cut through the stands to add extra support to the model. I wanted to have end caps on the rods like shown above, but had issues with the caps scaling strangely on either end of the model.

4. The caps were taken off of the rods and I started to add the backing board to the rack, and the rod was made to properly scale with the width of a line and the whole model.

5. Screenshot of the simple backing, scaled along the length of the white line.

6. I experimented for a while trying to find the best way to add the metal rack to the model, and settled on creating a curve and using a Sweep node. The curved piece was then copied and mirrored, but I could not find a way to bridge these two curves together when customising the width of the model. 

7. To bridge the gap between the two curved pieces, I added a separate Line and Sweep node that had its width scale with the width of the model. By modifying the offset of this tube I was able to get it to sit between the two curved ends at any width. 

8. The metal rack was fixed to the backing board. I added a basic material with a wood texture to test a UV unwrap, and added a slight bevel to the most of the parts of the model to make it appear smoother. 

9. I tried a variety of ways to get the height of the model to scale properly. I wanted the stands to scale upwards without the "legs" of the stand scaling as well, and wanted extra shelves to be added when increasing the height. I figured out that by increasing the scale of the cube used in the stand before adding the legs I was able to scale the model properly. I'm not sure how good of a technique this actually is but it ended up working for me. I wasn't able to get the extra shelves to appear properly at this time.

10. I converted the model to a Digital Asset and added the controls tab to the channel box. Even though I hadn't quite finished the height controls, I added them early.

11. I ran into an issue when adding shelves in which I wanted there to be more wooden bars than shelving, as there needed to be one additional bar at the bottom. I could have just made the bottom bar separate from the bars above it but I wanted to see if it was possible using a system similar to an array. Since the amount of shelves was determined by the amount of points in the Height line, I subtracted one from the array of objects to make the extra shelves only appear after an extra pole appears, using 

12. This is the complete tree before I added all the materials and fixed the UVs. The shelves now properly appeared and adjusted in position based on the height of the model.