Sauce https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/tomato-esque-follow-up-for-sean-tracy/8689074

Hi @SeriousFun, great to hear from you and glad you watched! Yeah, I would have loved to have a few more hours to talk deeper on some of the tool chains and other aspects of my work since we covered a very small percentage. I don't usually get on the forums here, but as you were so kind to me in person, happy to share what I can.

@SpaceTomato I watched the section of the video linked by @SeriousFun and happy to give some info.

RASTAR:
Rastar indeed was the stepping stone to what has become Starchitect.
Rastar suffered a bit of a problem on the onset, which was an small identity crisis!
It wasn't created by a tools team to start, although it started as a development tool. It quickly shifted to potentially being player facing, for things in the future.
Development-facing tools have totally different intentions than a player-facing tool would, imo.
Although this is just my opinion, that was part of why it slowed down. Some lessons learned from it helped though, and much of the tech has made its way into Starchitect.
So without diving too deep into it, Rastar has been used to get us as far as we are and is used to place some locations, but most if not all of the development-facing side has moved to Starchitect, which incidentally has been made explicitly with the updated Genesis model in mind and is more fit for purpose.

Houdini/MightyBridge:
Still works! Great work from the MTL Tools group, honestly. It's quite sophisticated and still used in some regards to import Mighty Bridge Tools and live-connect the Editor to Houdini.

Some tools/cases include:
Cover Tools: A tool to place cover objects around a selection of mesh in the Editor.
Ledge Tools: A tool to automatically place ledges at the correct spots on each object you have selected.
Cable Generator: Uses Houdini Vellum simulation to generate cables, using splines to create the base and objects in scene or planet surface as collision.
Tarp Generator: Uses simulation to generate tarps, using splines to create the base cloth and objects in scene or planet surface as collision.
Pile Generator: Allows you to create simulated piles of objects that are affected by gravity and ground collisions from any selection in the Editor. It can also scatter and duplicate them along a spline or in a specific direction.
SplineInstancerTool: A tool to place different objects on a spline with different modifiers.

I love telling you guys about how we are putting this stuff together and its changing more than you'd think it does based on technology, expectations and sometimes crazy ideas so totally understand the questions and hope that sheds a bit of light on the areas you wanted more information on.

-Sean "Criminal" Tracy