[cabidaher]

As a non-architect, I would love if you could explain some of what makes the non-duck designs _so_ horrible. Some of them looked more than fine to me at first glance. It's also something that can be rerun over and over with little interaction in-between runs so one could generate a handful of designs starting from different seeds and get inspiration.

[orthoxerox]

You generally want your rooms to be not just rectilinear, but rectangular after you fill in all built-in storage spaces. And storage spaces have to be sized appropriately to their intended purpose: you don't want three-foot-deep shelves. Another thing this optimizer doesn't take into account is corridors. It has the notion of room connections and area ratios, but area ratios are the wrong way to think about corridors: you want them to be as small as possible while still having at least a certain width.

[hwillis]

The algorithm prefers rectangular rooms, you'd just need to adjust it a bit. The wall loss function minimizes wall length and tries to regularize angles, so it naturally converges to square-ish rooms:

> we compute the norm of the tangent edge vector, which is equivalent to the norm of the 2D normal direction. Minimizing this loss has the following two effects: simplifying the wall between two adjacent rooms by penalizing its length, and aligning the boundary to the coordinate axis by making the coordinates of the tangent vector sparse in 2D.

The optimizer also seems like it should handle corridors okay as long as the corridor area is set to something reasonable. A corridor is just a room that is allowed to be long; since the other rooms will try to take up relatively square spaces you should be left with a long connecting area.

> And storage spaces have to be sized appropriately to their intended purpose: you don't want three-foot-deep shelves.

Like you said, this is the same minimum/maximum width problem that makes corridors wonky. I think this is relatively easily solved, though. A "minimum width" constraint is really just a requirement that no voronoi site is within X distance of a wall. A shelf is a sub-area in a room where there must be 2 borders within X distance of a voronoi point. Things like furniture and kitchen islands are also basically represented like that, as constrained areas.

A simpler alternative to complex per-point constraints would be to have area constraints per control point- a bunch of single-point "rooms" inside the actual rooms. In the case of a corridor, since the voronoi cells tend towards a square, you just need to set that area to the minimum width and they should avoid shrinking below that width.

[jeroenhd]

Based on some of the floor plans I've seen, architects also seem to have developed a habit of designing weird floor plans somewhere after the year 2000. I don't know why they thought apartments could need corridors with diverging or converging walls in the hallways, or why rooms without 90 degree angles are a good idea, but their decisions don't seem that far off the floor plans this tool generates.

These outputs are far from perfect but unfortunately they're not unrealistic.

[javier123454321]

If you just look at the plans in the initial diagram. Plan C is the only one that makes marginally useful spaces, avoiding excesive corners and awkward leftover space that ends up without use. It also happens to be the more obvious solution to the problem.

I could see the value in generating a bunch of rooms roughly accounting for the space requirements, but that's usually done in a more abstract way before taking into consideration things like privacy, thoroughfares, building conventions, spans, noise and light access, wind patterns, and things of that nature.